Our family recently went to New York City for a brief vacation. We had reservations at a hotel that was inexpensive as NYC goes. Very inexpensive. Suspiciously inexpensive.
So I was hesitant to bring the MacBook Pro up with me just to get it ripped off. What to do, what to do? Ubuntu to the rescue, of course!
I charged up my 6-year-old iBook, installed Ubuntu 6.10 PPC version on it, and the machine was off and running... well, make that strolling. Firefox is a hog and the iBook is no speed demon.
The biggest problem, as always, was getting wireless networking to work. With the standard install I could get on unprotected networks, but connecting to my WPA-encrypted network at home was a non-starter. Plus, there seemed to be nothing that allowed you to scan for and connect to new wireless networks like any other OS provides.
Did some Googling around and viola, came across network-manager:
http://www.gnome.org/projects/NetworkManager/
I installed it and the gnome frontend, rebooted, and... it didn't work. Googled some more. Turns out you have to edit /etc/network/interfaces to remove or comment out any network interfaces other than loopback. I of course didn't bookmark the page that discusses this, but it basically said "your file should look like this" so I made my file look like that.
(Here's a blog entry that has a good discussion about it...)
They said a logout/login should get things working. I did, but it didn't. So I rebooted and... YES! network-manager was up there in the menu bar in all its glory, working, letting me connect to unprotected AND WPA networks with no problems, listing all the SSIDs it could see.
Got to our NYC hotel, and although it was by no means the Ritz, it wasn't vermin-infested, and to my surprise... wireless internet access in the hotel! I was able to use my iBook and keep up to date on the world while in the room. Now all I have to do is fix the iBook's Y key...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment