I'm Sing the Linux Laptop Blues

[kilroy]

Oh well.
My sad and pitiful love affair with Kubuntu almost ended last night.
I have an Acer 5102 WLMi laptop . Has an atheros wifi chipset. Also has a Bison Webcam integrated into the lid of the lappie.

I had tried to get wifi installed and working back on edgy, used MadWifi - but could never get it to accept the WEP key. If I left the system wide open, with no security, I could connect. Was not prepared to do that. XP went back on. I was thrilled when I heard that feisty had much better Wifi Support. Installed from scratch, and the little network gadget down in the taskbar area actually showed my wifi router, and that it was secure. I then ran the updates that were requesting to be installed. Upon reboot, I could see NOTHING except the wired adapter (realtek).
I tried to install MadWifi - It would not uninstall, as per the manual on the website.

So - in a fit of frustration - kaboom - XP went back on.

I do not think I have tried any other distros on the laptop.
might give some or one of them a go this weekend.

Thanks
Andrew

[penguin.ch]

Re: I'm Sing the Linux Laptop Blues

I do not think I have tried any other distros on the laptop

My (unwanted ) recommendation: install Debian 4.0 and customize it in accordance to what Knoppix 5.X is (assumedly successful) providing for WiFi et al.

[kilroy]

Re: I'm Sing the Linux Laptop Blues

UnicornRider,

Thank you for responding.
I decided to give it 1 more go - I don't really want or need XP on my laptop.
I modified my wifi router to base access on MAC address's only, and disabled the WEP.

Re-installed Feisty, and lo & behold I have not looked back yet.

I am having some sound issues - when I plug some headphones in, it is very low volume, and the Bison Camera that is integrated into the lid - there is no known drivers according to Google searches for this device (ALI chipset)
I have not tried the SD card reader that is integrated too yet.

Other than that - and Skype not having video support (I do a lot of video conferencing with family all over the world) I think that I might just be able to make this work.

Also have an interesting SAMBA issue.
I have 3 shares setup on my server. I can access the MP3 & Backups share, but not my general share, even though they are all setup exactly the same.
I go into Konquerer, type in \\speedy\mp3
and it works
\\speedy\general and I get a request for credentials.

I guess I just need to lok at my conf file again.

Andrew