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January 31, 2006

WiFi and Linux

In the beginning of January of this year, I purchased a Linksys WUSB54G wireless network adapter for my computer. I really haven't had a chance to try it out in Linux as I've been so busy. These days, I tend to stay more in my Windows partition mostly because of my work and the unfortunate need for Internet Explorer and and MSFT Office.

When my hard drive failed, I looked at it as an opportunity to start fresh. I have a clean install of Windows XP and a clean install of Suse 10 on my drive. The Windows partition has 20GB of space and the Suse partition has 20GB as well. The rest of the hard drive is a shared partition for both operating systems to use.

Anyhow, I re-installed Suse 10 on my machine tonight to a bit of a surprise. My WUSB54G (version 3.1) worked right out of the box. I didn't have to do anything special to get the device working at all. Suse automatically detected it, found an IP address and here I am on the Internet writing about it. Although it may not seem like much to Windows or Mac users, this is a huge leap forward for my use of Linux.

As much as I love Linux, the lack of built in support for most wireless networking devices has always been a bit of a sore spot for me. I've spent countless hours working on complicated configurations to get a simple wireless device to get an IP address and access the Internet. This time, I clicked a few buttons to accept the default configuration that Suse gave me and that was it. I'm on the Internet and I'm networking wirelessly.

Makes me wish I had made the effort to configure this thing a bit sooner, but then again I wouldn't have known that the thing worked immediately, out of the box with no required updates of any sort.

~out...

Posted by ed at January 31, 2006 01:10 AM

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