Belkin + Linux != easy
07:20, June 7th, 2007 by hecatomb | Posted in opinion, software, techI’ve tinkered with different distros of Linux several times over the years… The one thing that kept me away was the availability of gaming support… You know, the important thing you use a computer for. I’ve got an extra laptop laying around, so I decided to give Ubuntu 7.04 a try. Now, this is an older laptop mind you, without an internal wireless card.
Hardware support in Linux has made leaps and bounds over the years, so I figured setting up a wireless card would be easy to add. Granted, a Belkin card is probably not the best choice to go with, but it was cheap, and I assumed it would work. Worst case scenario would be that I return the card.
After 3 hours, learning ndiswrapper, finding net8185.inf, and learning about ifconfig and iwconfig, it works…
Yay.
Hey Belkin, write easier to implement Linux drivers please… I don’t want to use ndiswrapper to utilize a Windows driver.
Thankfully there are tons of open source utilities to do almost everything I want… except game (which isn’t really possible on this crappy laptop). OpenOffice, GAIM, GIMP, etc.
If I actually end up using this more, I might have to consider looking at Dell’s new Ubuntu offerings.