After a long wait and a long story, my minipci wireless card arrived, so I chucked it into the laptop and booted up. It appeared in the lspci output, which was awesome.
On Debian, though, because Free is more important that Working, you’ve got to copile your own copy of the madwifi driver. This bores me to tears, and I think I’m so offended by the prospect of having to a) compile a kernel module, and b) have to do it every time the kernel package is upgraded, that I’m going to forego my dreams of doing native Debian packaging work and install Ubuntu.
I didn’t do this in the first place because for a fleeting moment I thought it would be fun to get back into random system hacking, like what I used to do in uni; so I spent a few hours reading HOWTOs after I installed the laptop, to find that getting suspend-to-RAM working was so trivial that I was surprised to find it didn’t already just work.
But it turns out that I’m more interested in getting my work done, than having to fiddle with things that should already just work – these problems have already been solved by other people – so I’m going to switch.
My name is Ellen Feiss, and I’m a student.