Finally on Wireless!

I know I’m late to the game, but I’ve finally got a wireless network installed at home. I got myself a Belkin Wireless ADSL Router to replace my current ADSL router. The router itself was easy enough to set up but unfortunately setting up XP to use the wireless network was a nightmare!

I tried so hard to make XP use my wireless network to no avail. Due to some bug in the Service Pack 1 release of XP, it was continously creating some kind of bridge for me between all my networks. I had to figure out that I don’t need the bridge and once I had that sorted I tried to get wireless working again. I couldn’t get it to work with WEP encryption and so I opted for the WPA-PSK method which I’ve read is better as it fixes some older attacks which WEP was vulnerable to.

For those interested, I tried the using the network without encryption in linux and it worked straight away! What a surprise and a breath of fresh air! I’m using Ubuntu Linux nowadays by the way. It is a Debian based distro which has it’s own packages which they update around every six months or so. It’s heavily GNOME-based but looks quite good so far. Sleeping the laptop and other ACPI-related stuff doesn’t all work yet, but that’s pretty much how it is with all new Centrino-based laptops nowadays so I’ll just have to wait probably about a year or so before all that is sorted out in Linux (I mean done for me automatically without recompiling kernels, not that I mind the occasional kernel recompile )