[ale] RH8.0: first impressions

[Joe]

cfowler <cfowler at outpostsentinel.com> writes:

> I had a very nice experience with wireless last week.  I installed
> FreeBSD 4.7 on a laptop and got everything working well.  I got KDE
> running and almost everything working that I normally use in Linux.
> I was using a 3c589 pcmcia card and had a thought about wireless.  I was
> curious so I plugged my Prism2 card into the slot and I was amazed to
> find out that I did not have and hour ahead of me to configure the
> card.  It worked.  

Ooh, good idea. I knew that FreeBSD subscription would come in handy
someday. I've got the 4.6 CDs lying around here somewhere.

> It seems that BSD has placed wireless support in ifconfig.  There was no
> need to run wland or any of the wlan stuff.  The first time I tried to
> get my card working in Linux it took me a few hours.  I did not realize
> there was another layer that had to be configured to run in user space. 

There isn't, the way mine was set up. Maybe you were using the
kernel's internal PCMCIA code. I used the pcmcia-tools package and the
associated kernel patch (and disabled PCMCIA support in the stock
kernel).

> I was very suprised to see this ease of use for 802.11b in FreeBSD.

Looking forward to it.

Man. Playing with new distros. What a great way to avoid actual work :-)

Cheers,

-- Joe Knapka

> 
> On Fri, 2003-02-28 at 22:36, James P. Kinney III wrote:
> > On Fri, 2003-02-28 at 19:28, Joe wrote:
> > > Got the ISOs, burnt them, blew Slack 8.1 off of my laptop and fired up the
> > > Anaconda installer.
> > > 
> > > The good:
> > > 
> > > - Very simple install.
> > > - Very nice looking screens all over the place.
> > > - Detected and set up the video, display, mouse, and kbd correctly, first try.
> > 
> > Yep! 
> > > 
> > > The bad:
> > > 
> > > - Good lord, it's slow. I don't know how they did it, but they figured out
> > > how to make Linux perform like Windows.
> > 
> > Nautilus is nice, but there is a serious performance hit. 
> > 
> > > - It has no clue about the sound (which is 100% SB compatible).
> > 
> > It may be due to a sound chip using an odd DMA setting. 
> > 
> > > - It has no clue about my PRISM2 802.11b card. I was using the wlan-ng
> > > driver with it under Slack, but RH doesn't include wlan-ng, so it's
> > > trying to use the wvlan_cs driver. I've made that work before, but
> > > not with WEP, and RH doesn't know how to configure PCMCIA netcards
> > > (or so it seems).
> > 
> > Due to the pre-beta aspect of large parts of the  wlan-ng stuff (lots it
> > ready for release, but other parts are still flaky) My USB prism2 is not
> > supported at all (it is claimed to be but...)
> > 
> > I've had good luck with pcmcia under RedHat. It has "just worked". The
> > new "wizard" stuff is bit too windowish but you can set the device to
> > use for each ethx device
> > > 
> > > [OK, I just found the "Internet Connection Wizard", which seems to want
> > > to let me set my WEP key and ESSID, but it still won't hook up with
> > > my AP... grr. It keeps resetting the ESSID to "non-spec".]
> > > 
> > > All in all, I'm a bit disappointed so far. Maybe I need to give it
> > > time.
> > 
> > I have yet to play with 8.1, but what I have read is it has a much need
> > speed boost from nautilus and the window manager. 8.2 should be great :)
> > > 
> > > Cheers,
> > > 
> > > -- Joe Knapka
> > > _______________________________________________
> > > Ale mailing list
> > > Ale at ale.org
> > > http://www.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> > -- 
> > James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
> > CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
> > Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
> > 770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
> > http://www.localnetsolutions.com
> > 
> > GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics) <jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
> > Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7 
> -- 
> "The Law of Leaky Abstractions"
> There is a time where abstractions lead to the inablity to 
> fix problems that leak through the abstraction.
> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html
> 
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> 

-- 
  "I'd rather chew my leg off than maintain Java code, which
   sucks, 'cause I have a lot of Java code to maintain and
   the leg surgery is starting to get expensive." - Me
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