Wireless

Goodness gracious, I must have the worst luck with Linux-friendly Ubuntu devices. Lemme do a run-down aight?

Some days ago my dad bought this little guy from Newegg. I told him to go ahead, because according to the Ubuntu compatibility list, this card worked fine (scroll down to see SMCWPCI-G). But what do you know, although I have the same card, turns out that this one has a whole different chipset.

Now let me explain something here. All wireless cards have a certain "chipset". It's the special hardware inside that does what it does. Now different companies use different chipsets. There are some chipsets (made by other companies) used by multiple companies that make the wireless cards. For instance, there are chipsets known as Atheros, Prism, Broadcom, etc. The companies, like SMC, Netgear, Toshiba use a certain chipset (in this case Atheros) in their wireless cards. Got it? Ok. Well, this card was suppose to use the Atheros chipset, which is a very compatible chipset with Linux. (You see, the companies that make the CHIPSET sometimes don't give out the specific details (once in code, this is known as a driver) on how to actually use their chipsets with other Operating Systems besides Windows. So some hackers make their own, but they never work as well as the official drivers. PHEW! A lot of parenthesis...) Anyway, it suppose to be Atheros, but it turned out to be one by Realtek, an RTL8185.

So what happens? The drivers for the chipset (both by the official company, and the ones made by those kind programmers) suck! It freezes the computer on boot, or while conencting, so they are worthless...and now I can't use that card in Linux.

Before, that machine (by the way, it's my mom's PC I'm talking about) used this wireless adapter. (Yes, another SMC product. Last time I buy from them) After some extreme headaches and hax I somehow got those things to work quite well in Linux. But after messing around so much trying to get the other card to work, I somehow disabled that stupid wireless key, and now neither of them work. >_<

And so now, I've bought this guy and await his arrival eagerly. It's supposedly another Linux-friendly adapter, we'll see about that. :P But for now, my mom is booting into Windows (which has the proper drivers, and has that wireless card working fine) and doing her internet surfing there.

Darn drivers...and Windows...and companies...