I've been messing around with the wifi on this Winbook G733e laptop (desktop replacement, really) for months now. Today I finally got the wifi working. I had to use ndiswrapper (and the reason for the delay is, I had lost the recovery CD long ago, so it took a while for me to:
A. break down and ask for the Windows recovery CD from my brother and
B. wait for the CD to arrive and
C. actually install it (I needed to find an empty drive to recover onto)
D. finally get desperate enough to sit down for a few hours to get the wifi working
Even after all that, there was no joy. Tools such as KWLan and KWifiManager would *see* the wireless access point, but they couldn't communicate with it. Nor would a simple dhclient wlan0 work. Finally I tried WLAssistant. That got me on the network.
It's frustrating that I don't know what the problem really was and how WLAssistant is different from the other two wifi helper tools. I'm very happy though that wifi is finally working. I was contemplating switching to another laptop, or buying a USB wifi device (iffy, even for the same "model", different versions aren't necessarily labeled differently, and they won't all work with linux). I'm glad to be able to sidestep that.
I'm still going to switch to another laptop. But that'll be 2 years or so from now, when dual core laptops will be much more powerful, and alternative power sources (fuel cells perhaps, or better batteries) will provide hours of unplugged work time. My laptop is almost 7 pounds with everything on it. I don't mind though. I don't travel with it all the time, and when I do, I travel light so that I have enough space and strength to lug the laptop around ;-).
A. break down and ask for the Windows recovery CD from my brother and
B. wait for the CD to arrive and
C. actually install it (I needed to find an empty drive to recover onto)
D. finally get desperate enough to sit down for a few hours to get the wifi working
Even after all that, there was no joy. Tools such as KWLan and KWifiManager would *see* the wireless access point, but they couldn't communicate with it. Nor would a simple dhclient wlan0 work. Finally I tried WLAssistant. That got me on the network.
It's frustrating that I don't know what the problem really was and how WLAssistant is different from the other two wifi helper tools. I'm very happy though that wifi is finally working. I was contemplating switching to another laptop, or buying a USB wifi device (iffy, even for the same "model", different versions aren't necessarily labeled differently, and they won't all work with linux). I'm glad to be able to sidestep that.
I'm still going to switch to another laptop. But that'll be 2 years or so from now, when dual core laptops will be much more powerful, and alternative power sources (fuel cells perhaps, or better batteries) will provide hours of unplugged work time. My laptop is almost 7 pounds with everything on it. I don't mind though. I don't travel with it all the time, and when I do, I travel light so that I have enough space and strength to lug the laptop around ;-).
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