We finished the conversion of our household network to all OS X machines, but I felt bad for my poor Athlon XP gaming rig that was gathering dust. I decided to make it the next iteration of the Basement File Server. This would, of course, require getting a wireless card to work with Linux. My previous experience along those lines involved a good deal of frustration and expletives, but I was hopeful that things would have improved in the meantime.

Ubuntu has a good reputation for making things easy, so I try their newest release, Edgy I scanned their Wiki documentation for a long time and eventually decided on a D-Link WDA-1320 because it “just works” according to user reports. The OS installation went very smoothly as far as Linux is concerned, though the installer GUI did cough up a couple of undecipherable errors about some GNOME configuration program.

The installation completed without an opportunity to actually configure networking. I missed that from my OS X installs where the computer is online immediately post-installation. The online documentation pointed me at a GUI networking configuration program on a system administration menu. That program did indeed have wireless configuration screens, including the ability to enter a “hex” or “ASCII” password. No mention of whether the encryption method was WEP or WPA.

I entered the password, saved the changes, and things didn’t work. No shock there! This is the Linux I remember and strived to avoid this time around. Back to the documentation, I found the equivalent instructions for the command line. “ifconfig” showed both an “ath0″ and “wifi0″ interface, which was confusing. It implied that there were two distinct wireless cards in the machine, which I know isn’t true. The “iwconfig” command, required for configuring wireless options, reported that “atho” had the wireless extensions, while “wifi0″ did not. “ifdown wifi0″ merely gave an error and I still don’t understand what that interface is for.

Anyway, the basic command line instructions still didn’t work. I found another help document describing instructions for WPA, the authentication method used on my LAN. Those involved running an as yet unmentioned command, “wpa_supplicant.” That one immediately got things working. Nice! But I still had to go modify the /etc/networking/interfaces file to be sure that the settings would save after restarts of the networking interface.

To summarize, Linux wireless configuration is better than it used to be, but it still sucks compared to OS X and probably cannot be grok’d by the average user. The GUI configuration tool never tells you that it can’t do WPA, nor is it clear that you have to go run some other utility package to do WPA. The online documentation does have all the necessary information, but it isn’t organized in a hierarchical fashion to help out the new user.