[H-GEN] OS suggestions wanted for WiFi on a laptop

Stuart Longland stuartl at longlandclan.hopto.org
Tue Apr 15 08:57:46 EDT 2003


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Hi,
~ Comments Inline

Greg Black wrote:
| I have a laptop that runs FreeBSD-4.3 (and Windows-ME) quite
| successfully.  It does not run later versions of FreeBSD (i.e.,
| 4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 or 5.0) without special magic at boot time
| and, once booted in those releases, refuses to talk to my
| wireless NIC.  OpenBSD-3.2 and 3.3 install and run, but won't
| talk to the NIC either (albeit with entirely different symptoms
| from the same driver).

Hrmm, odd.  What's the specs on the laptop?  Is there any IRC channels,
official mailing lists, newsgroups, etc where someone else may have
struck this problem?

There's some support information at http://www.freebsd.org/support.html,
have you tried searching here?

| My next choices would seem to be NetBSD and/or a Linux variant,
| of which I'd most likely prefer to try Debian.  I'm not in any
| way interested in religious preferences -- I just want to use a
| free[1] OS that is up-to-date and can be maintained with
| security fixes and so on.  It's fine under FreeBSD-4.3, but that
| release is now getting long in the tooth and is not covered by
| newer bug fixes[2].

Debian should be fine, and apt would be a useful tool for keeping
up-to-date.  I personally prefer Red Hat (although I'm starting to move
away now, looking at Linux-from-scratch now) which can be updated using
the official up2date (requires RHN subscription) or using autoupdate,
which seems to work just nicely.

I can't really comment on *BSD as I've never actually used it.  I've got
some spare time over the next week, so I might throw v5.0 on a machine
and try it out.  As for broken PCMCIA support, it could be just a
perculiarity with your PCMCIA chipset that the developer's haven't seen
before, but then again (no offence to anyone) some of the BSD community
(not everyone, and I sencerely hope not the majority) tend to have a
little bit too much ego here and this could be a problem.  (Especially
with respect to FreeBSD vs Linux).

| Unless you think your ideas will be widely interesting, I'd
| suggest private replies to me rather than to the list.  It would
| be a shame to start a little flamefest over this.

Well, I don't intend to start any flames, please dump your flames to
/dev/null unless you really *must* make them heard.  If the latter is
the case, I've got a newsgroup/forum just for this, so we don't alienate
the others: news://www.longlandclan.hopto.org/boxingring/ or
http://www.longlandclan.hopto.org/phorum/list.php?f=6

- --
+-------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stuart Longland           stuartl at longlandclan.hopto.org |
| Brisbane Mesh Node: 719             http://stuartl.cjb.net/ |
| I haven't lost my mind - it's backed up on a tape somewhere |
| Griffith Student No:           Course: Bachelor/IT @ Nathan |
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