[nflug] My 2 cents on wireless Linux

[Boice]

Greetings, all.

I realize 802.11x is yesterday's topic, but I'm on the digest version of
the list and just got those mssgs.

First, let me introduce myself, since I've never posted on the list
before, although I've been reading it a few weeks.

John G. Boice, at your service.  Age: middle 50's, occupation: none
-disabled for the last 16 years.  Linux user for about 2 years. I'm not
exactly living on the Niagara Frontier, being an hour south of Buffalo
via the Thruway, but nflug seemed the closest, unless I want to organize
a lug here in Chautauqua County. [Maybe there is one & I'm just unaware?]

Yeah, "Chautauqua County." Town of Pomfret to be precise.

If you've been watching the local news re: "Bucky" Phillips, the
shooting of the 2 State Troopers was fairly close to our homestead. 
We're not inside the police stakeout inner perimeter, but close enough
so that we had the cop 'copter flying overhead all evening long in their
search loop. . . made it hard to hear the Chris Isaak videos we rented
on DVD from netflix. . . The wife got stopped on her way to work this
morning in a roadblock car-to-car search.

Anyway, enuff with my personal intro.


Wi-Fi:
1] 802.11n seems so bogged down at this point I wouldn't count on it
until 2008. I'm def' not a network guru, but from what I read. . .hmmm?
Don't hold yer breath!  And don't buy any pre-spec hardware.

For example:
http://www.tomsnetworking.com/2006/06/01/draft_11n_revealed_part1/

2] Dzien dobry, wpos2 at adelphia.net. 

I had some difficulty getting a good distro for my Toshiba laptop with
802.11g "Centrino technology."  SUSE 10.1 was the first to work, but was
in general slow to boot and a bit sluggish on the 1.7 GHz Pentium M with
512 MB RAM.

I now have a triple-boot system, with the original pre-installed WinXP
crowded into 10 GB to make room for Mepis 6.0 and MyahOS 2.1. 

Granted, it's the integrated Intel 2200BG chip -- I don't know what
wireless adapter you're trying to run.  But Mepis 6.0 recognized my
wireless and all I had to do was initialize it through the GUI --I think
it wanted to know which channel my router broadcast on. I'm off in the
sticks, so I don't need WEP/WPA. I just let the router filter MAC
addresses & put the MAC addrs' of all our machines on the list.  No
matter what distro I'm playing with, the wireless encryption isn't an
additional time-consuming factor.

MyahOS is an almost unknown little distro, but it logged onto my
wireless network before it was even finished installing! 

Both Mepis & Myah use KDE as default desktop. Myah is slackware based,
while Mepis, which has been very close to pure Debian up 'til now, has
become Ubuntu-centric enough so that Mepis's Synaptic can use the Ubuntu
repos -- even Automatix  works on Mepis 6.

http://myah.org/index.php
http://www.mepis.org/

BTW, both are Live CD's, but I don't remember if I got Mepis to do my
wireless off the LiveCD. I think I did --it just needed re-configuring
the WiFi channel after HDD install since it didn't save my Live session
settings.

cheers,
John
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