ubuntu wifi

I'm at Bo's coffee club in the Robinson's Galleria mall. I would put links there but frankly, I can't find the official websites with some very half-hearted googling. I'm running ubuntu on a toshiba laptop with an Atheros AR5212 802.11abg wifi card and ubuntu detected the wifi card flawlessly.

I also installed ubuntu on a winbook laptop with an Intel wifi chipset (it was a 1.5Ghz centrino system) and that was directly detected too. I'm not sure how ubuntu did that (with the intel system), since the intel firmware is required for that. I wasn't paying very much attention, just installing stuff and downloading packages from the network. Maybe it auto-downloaded the firmware upon detection. Or maybe it came with EasyUbuntu.

That probably cements my transition to ubuntu from mandriva. The main factor in the transition is the rate of development. Ubuntu has working svk packages (I never could get svk working correctly with Mandriva, although the packages are there) long before Mandriva does. And I never could get wifi working with Mandriva (although, to be fair, that was me being lazy, if I were younger and had more time and patience, I'd have figured it out long ago).

I never have been a linux fanboy. I'm a pragmatist. Whatever works better, that's what I use. Windows doesn't work for me since it's impossible to keep secure and, frankly, I can't afford the MS-Office license (windows itself I could afford, barely). Now, I *do* get a valid and legal MS-Office license with the laptops I purchase from the U.S., but then they have that pesky "legal only in the U.S.A." clause, so even if they're legal there, I can't use them in the rest of the world. At one point RedHat was the distribution to use (and before that, slackware). But now RedHat is moving in the direction of enterprise systems and I don't want to be in Fedora (where I would need to be if I wanted svk, etc).

I moved to Mandrake/Mandriva because of the superior package management, but now the speed of development isn't quite right for me. Ubuntu feels right. Although I wouldn't be surprised if I were to move on to something a bit faster later on.

Ah, but this post was not supposed to be about reminiscence. Instead, I was going to celebrate finally getting wifi working. I'm sitting in Bo's coffee club and for the price of a Cafe Latte I'm able to connect to Robinson's free wifi. The DNS is very slow (one reason why I don't have links above, the other being mentioned above), but surfing to this or that site, once it's been resolved, is pretty good. The DHCP server provides two IPs (the first of which does not reply to ping). That's a bit incompetent. But removing it from the list doesn't speed up DNS queries much (or at all, as far as I can tell). Once DNS resolves though, things are pretty good.

Connection to my office VPN is pretty fast (faster than at home), so I guess they use either meridian or PLDT (my home connection via Destiny Cable Internet takes a roundtrip overseas, so the VPN connection is reasonable, but not this fast).

OK. nmap -v says that the first DNS server *is* up, just not replying to ping.

I'm very happy to get wifi up and running, finally. Previously I didn't care very much. I still don't, really, since fast internet is available at work and at home. But it's a great convenience to be able to connect to wifi networks.

Next thing to learn, I guess, is how to connect to closed networks. It's been 4 years since I last had anything to do with that and it was a pain then (even with windows). I'm sure it's much easier now. Haven't done it at all though, yet. So there's going to be some learning involved.