The Virtual Abbey

I'm moving my home network from Windows XP to OpenSuse Linux 10.3; I'm doing this mainly as a preeemptive measure so that I do not have to start converting things to Vista, which, from all reports, is a very broken operating system.

There are some things Linux does well; there are others it does poorly. One thing it has terrible difficulty with is wireless networking. I have one box, an old laptop, that I really care about being networked wirelessly, as I use it downstairs in my home. It, of course, is refusing all native Linux drivers for its wireless card, and is also refusing to run a Windows driver emulator known as NDISWRAPPER, which, in theory, uses the Windows drivers to make it run. There are pages and pages written about my specific problem on the various Linux forums, but no answer appears to work. Linux troubleshooting is a bit like philosophy; you'll find various theories of being and ontology to explain things, but in the end you're left with "Well, this worked for me in Fedora", or "this works in Ubuntu" and maybe other builds, or "this worked fine in 10.1 but not 10.2." All I know is that my wireless card does not work.

I will probably buy a PCMCIA wireless card today and engage in a fresh round of struggles with it.

My wired machines work beautifully; my main system is running a dual boot OpenSuse 10.3/Windows XP Pro, so that I have access to my old Windows universe should I need it. Overall, I'm impressed with the functionality of Linux and the quality of the design. I'm running the KDE interface, which is elegant.

The other dilemma is this -- my computer room is upstairs in my house. Right now, I have no air conditioning installed in it; the window units I use my wife is refusing to let me install unless she is there to supervise; we had new windows put in last year and she doesn't want me to scratch them. So I suffered in 90+ degree heat trying to troubleshoot these problems; periodically going down to the first floor where I have it at 68 degrees in order to cool off. Wireless networking would let me stay on the first floor. It is of course the one functionality I cannot get to work.

I have a clearer notion now of what Hell is like. It is working on computers in terrible heat with an unfamiliar operating system while getting conflicting advice from 5 different web forums.

UPDATE: The solution was changing to a PCMCIA card using the Atheros chipset and a Linux plugin named Madwifi. It's working -- not great mind you, but it's working.