Re: [Hampshire] Fedora 7 Review

** Tony Whitmore <tony@???> [2007-06-09 13:31]:
> Paul Tansom wrote:
> > I really wish I could get my head around whether I'm a die hard
> > Debianite or a fledgling Ubuntu user at the moment. There's a lot to
> > like about Ubuntu, although every time I decide to give it another bash
> > it trips me up. Of course it doesn't help that the two machines I've
> > tried it on so far have both been a few years old and both rely on
> > wireless networking on a network that uses WPA not WEP (as far as I can
> > see it still doesn't do WPA out of the box in, erm, 7.04 - I can't
> > remember the 'name' for it!).
>
> Network Manager, and it does do WPA out of the box. The limitation
> /might/ be that the driver for your network card doesn't support WPA or
> the generic wireless extensions.
** end quote [Tony Whitmore]

I'm glad I included 'as far as I can see' then :) I presume the options,
tools, etc. are not in the menus if the card doesn't support WPA then.
The card is a TI based USR card and I've not fully explored the
capabilities. Of my 7 different wireless cards (3x PCI, 2xUSB, 2xPCMCIA)
I'm not sure as I have a single one that will play nicely with Linux -
more reading to do :)

This is actually one of my more recent pet hates of Windows - the
dynamic menu. I can't remember the application I was using a year or so
back, but I spent ages trying to work out why the menu item in the
help/documentation wasn't there, and eventually found out that it was
because I didn't have the right part of the window hilighted - not that
I could see any reason for the menu item not working as a result, it
just wasn't relevent to that part of the app. Cleary there is the
argument that keeping menu items hidden if they are not relevant, but I
think grey'ing out is a far better means of doing this.

Actually, thinking about it, I am basing this on having booted off the
live Xubuntu and not Ubuntu, so it may not be in the menus there
perhaps. Having just taken a closer look at the Ubuntu documentation I
see that you have to disable the device in the Networking properties
before Network Manager takes any notice of the interface. Since I was
looking in the Networking properties to configure the device I was
clearly looking in the wrong place. That said if I had seen Network
Manager listed in one of the menus I'd have taken a look in there -
again, maybe a difference between Ubuntu and Xubuntu.

I'll have to get the Ubuntu CD working. Evey time I get a machine to try
it on there seems to be a problem of some sort - too little RAM for the
live CD, wireless network card that needs WPA working of the CD to use
(problem pre-7.04), 10-15 minutes boot time, etc., etc.. So far Debian
is much easier, but I have this nagging desire to like Ubuntu if I could
just get the chance to really try it!!

It has to be said that his particular machine is a bit of a nightmare.
XP runs very badly on it, although a 1.2GHz Athlon with an nVidia
GeForce MX 440 should be adequate for it with 768M of RAM. It has
improved noticably since I removed the DVD ROM drive though, as this
allowed me to move the ZIP drive off IDE1 with the HD and onto IDE2 with
the new DVD writer (all my other machines have one drive per channel by
virtue of extra controllers). The networking is also very nasty since
the wireless driver doesn't kick in to connect you to the network until
a user logs on since all security/network stuff runs in a user level
app. This means that if a user that doesn't have full adminstrative
access logs on they get no wireless network, unless an adminstrator has
log on before - nasty, very nasty!

--
Paul Tansom