WPAlmost

[vakkotaur]

Wolvix 1.1.0 has been out of beta for a while now and I finally got around to giving it a try in the LiveCD version on the laptop (Compaq Armada 7800, PII-266 192 MB RAM) and while it seems to work much like the installed 1.0.5 does there are a couple places where it doesn't work. One is sound, which isn't a big deal. While it would be nice to have sound, I seldom use it on the laptop and could do without it if need be. The other is WPA (which 1.0.5 doesn't do at all, at least not without lots of hoop-jumping) for wireless.

It's not that wireless doesn't work. Oh, no. Once I tell the system which ethernet interface to use, it will happily find a neighbor's unsecured network and use it, even if I don't tell it to go looking - though I can tell it to stop that and it will. What it won't do, as far as I can tell so far, is connect to the AirPort Express using WPA. Searching the web for solutions doesn't get my hopes up when I see a page proclaiming that Linux and the AirPort Express is a combination that doesn't work, even if he was trying to do more than simply connect. I knew it was time to take a break when I read "macoshints" as "masochist."

I am even starting to consider the use of Jay's older Apple laptop (12 inch PowerBook G4) as Apple stuff talks to Apple stuff just fine, of course. There are a few things holding me back on that, or at least making me nervous. I'd have to see about a proper trackball (the PowerBook will use an external pointer, but only via USB). I'd have to see what it would take to talk to the Canon PowerShot S410, which I suspect might not be too much. And then the thing really has me hesitating: Would I be stuck with Steve Job's idea of how things must look, complete with retina-searing white-hot backgrounds, or could I fix things to have a much more soothing experience?

I have installed Wolvix on percheron where it works quite well, but percheron isn't a laptop. It has a wired network connection and sound "just worked."