[ale] Wireless Wonderland - not

[tom]

I'm not quite sure what to make of all of this, other than Wireless 
networking under Linux still has some "interesting" corners. I've got 
wireless working, it is just not quite as smooth as I would like.

I don't think I'm going to worry muchly about the situation, but I'm 
posting some observations just in case there is a flash of brilliance.

Hardware - an old Thinkpad T22 with a no-name usb cardbus connector 
running Ubuntu 9.04, Jaunty Jacklope.

On the advice of a thread here a week or so ago, I've shifted to using 
wicd as opposed to the default connection manager, whatever it is called. 
For the most part I'm happy with the change, as wicd has a vastly better 
interface to my way of thinking. It wasn't until I grabbed a different usb 
interface dongle that I realized something might not be as happy as I 
thought, because the wireless interface went away. Far Away. Now the old 
connection manager picked up and was quite happy with the fact that I have 
a bit of a collection of usb wireless dongles, and seemingly would work 
with most of them. wicd wants to know ahead of time where the interface 
is.

As I'm sure much of the list knows, where the kernel puts the network 
connection for a wireless device is a little bit random.

What I decided to do was sit down, boot from a cold start, and find out 
where each of my dongles gets put. I added the results from the two card 
bus interfaces just for giggles and chuckles.

ZyXEL G-102v2 cardbus		ath0	(gives a weak connection)
Linksys WPC54Gver3 cardbus	eth1	(at the distance
 					attempted, no connection)
ZyXEL G-220v2			wlan2	(attempts to reconnect 1 per min)
Belkin G (model ?)		wlan1	(adaquate connection)
Trendnet TEW-429UF		nothing showed up, but it does appear on
 				desktop as a CD and usb disk - supposed
 				to work under linux as a wireless
 				interface
Linksys usb connector		wlan0	(adaquate connection)
 	(cann't read the model information at this time)

NetGear WG111v2			wlan3	(attempts to reconnect 1 per min+)

None of these wireless interfaces show up in the /dev/ directory, which I 
thought they did in the past.

Ok. The obvious approach to making things go smoothly is to settle on just 
one adaptor, which in this case would appear to be the Belkin G. So I 
really don't have a problem here to "solve" as such.

OTOH, I've got such a collection, and it would be rather nice to fix 
things up to "just work" at some point. Now that the observations are out 
here where in theory I can find them again, maybe I'll get around to 
working on it sometime.

FWIW, I've Googled about the Trendnet adaptor, and it is supposed to work, 
but I've found nothing about the necessary incantation to make it do so. I 
may just pitch that one out at some point.

Thanks for the bandwith.