September 26, 2003

• Linux High-Speed Connection

  
  

  Working At Last

  Actually, I gave up trying to get the Wireless USB device to work with either flavor of Linux, despite the fact that I was making progress under Mandrake Linux. I sent off for a different kind of device instead.

  
  

  The problem is USB. It isn't designed for block transfers like a parallel device normally does. It does its thing serially. Universal <strong>Serial</strong> Bus -- that's what it is. It's nice that you can plug it into lots of different devices and have it recognized, but even Windows was having problems with USB as an interface to a wireless LAN connection.

  
  

  So I got an ordinary NIC (Network Interface Connector) and tied it to a wireless bridge. All of the configuration, the little bit that is required, happens in the bridge, controlled through a browser. That is, the setup is controlled through a browser. Once it is set up, it stands alone, ready to go. It just sits there, happily connecting between my wireless router and the new NIC on my computer.

  
  

  I configured the bridge to talk directly to the Internet as if there were no other computers connected to the router. That made configuration of the Linux simple: I just told it that it was connected to a cable modem with DHCP capabilities, as if the router didn't exist, and the software bought this fiction. It didn't need to know about the router's security protocols or internal IP addressing setup at all. Everything but the cable modem is invisible to the computer. It thinks it is directly connected from the moment I turn the power on.

  
  

  I hope it will be equally simple to convince Lindows to talk high-speed to the Internet. Lindows resisted all of my attempts to compile a wireless USB driver, being even more stubborn than Mandrake. With so simple a scheme, though, there is hope I can get even Lindows going again.

  
  

  And if Windows gives me any problems I can always continue to use the existing wireless USB device, however inconvenient that may prove to be.

  
  

  I only had a few minutes to test Mandrake Linux with the high speed connection but it was able to connect to several Web sites, ample evidence that it works.

  • 22:54
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