Do you pine for the days when men were men and wrote their own device
drivers? (Linus)
Maybe it's time for all of us to move to OpenBSD or something (or get
the Hurd going?)
I'm finding a lot of things getting easier to set up on Ubuntu than
Windows. Just yesterday I set up the wireless on my mom's printer, and
used my Ubuntu laptop as the guinea pig to see if it was ready to go.
Doing this couldn't have been easier, but I had to jump through quite a
few more hoops to get it going on her netbook, took about 20 minutes
(granted it was Windows XP -- don't know what it's like in Vista or Win7).
-Bob
Rob Sherwood incurred the wrath of Bob on Jan 2, by saying
>Random story, for your (unlikely) amusement.
>
>I'm in Turkey now visiting my in-laws. For an internet connection,
>interestingly, they've actually dropped their wired DSL and have
>gotten a 3G usb dongle instead because it's both faster and cheaper
>here (!?) and they split their time between two houses, so this way
>they only have to pay for one connection. This is great for them, but
>it means that only one computer can be on the net at a time, which
>sucks when my wife and I come to visit and both want to work all day.
>
>So, I decided to roll up my sleeves and (1) get the USB dongle to work
>on my linux laptop, and then (2) re-export the 3G link by turning my
>laptop into a wifi access point. After reading some docs, it turned
>out I had to configure the AP firmware in my driver and set up dhcp,
>nat, and dns for the network I was creating. All no problem, done it
>before. But, it turned out my wireless card (iwl-agn driver) doesn't
>support AP mode, and I had some dhcp configuration issue, and blah
>blah blah... before I knew it I was reading kernel documentation for
>the wireless AP API trying to figure out how hard it would be to write
>the missing AP support code for the driver. As a second thread, I had
>to find the right software to configure and run the 3G dongle, because
>there is some random pin you have to use to auth to the device before
>you can even set it up to connect, and blah blah blah. This was very
>quickly looking like it was going to be a nightmare.
>
>Then, out of curiosity, I clicked on the NetworkManger icon on my
>desktop. It had automatically discovered the USB dongle ("Mobile
>Broadband DLS Connection"), and when I clicked the connect button, I
>got a GUI prompt for the device PIN and then in a few seconds, it had
>an IP and was completely working without touching a config file or
>even thinking about a device driver. Then, I happened to find ---
>also in net manager --- the "Create a new wireless network" button,
>which --- in one click! --- created an ad-hoc network[1], and setup an
>ip, ip range, dhcp, dns *and* the natting[2]. A quick test from a
>windows laptop and everything pretty much worked right out of the box.
>
>I am completely blown away by how far linux has come... it was %)(*@
>crazy :-) I mean, I'm used to stability and flexibility, but the
>pure ease-of-use is really new to me. Windows doesn't work this
>easily (my first attempt at this project was to try to the same thing
>with the window vista and windows 7 boxes that are also here...).
>
>Thought I would share,
>
>- Rob
>.
>
>[1] For all I know, it auto detected that my wifi card doesn't support
>AP mode, and thus didn't prompt me about becoming an AP :-)
>
>[2] Interestingly, all implemented with a single binary,
>/usr/sbin/dnsmasq, which configures the nat, and handles the dhcp and
>dns transparently.
>
--
Cheers,
Bob Schmertz
