Where Are My Teeth?

in which I declare defeat

I've been building an LCD picture frame with a tiny little linux motherboard and a notebook hard disk behind it, and I thought it would be really cool to have a wireless network connection so that I could dowload pictures to it remotely, upgrade the software without taking it off the wall, and generally have another computer in the house to play with.

So I went to the web site of the people who supposedly make drivers for wireless USB adaptors, and I followed different driver that was supposed to be compatible with my particular linux kernel. Uh-uh. I upgraded my kernel, then downgraded it. Nope. I downloaded the source code for the driver and compiled it from scratch (which also requires downloading and configuring the source code for the kernel. whee.). Nuh-uh. I downoaded a bunch of usb scanning tools so I could make sure the dongle was really there. It was, but no driver software was willing to claim responsibility for it. (May I say that each of these negative results required an hour or two of fiddling with scripts that were supposed to be somewhere but weren't, or if they were there produced microsoft-level uninformative error messages, plus powering down the machine and booting it back up every time something might have changed for the better?)

I'm sure that someone who has configured this stuff successfully could spend only a few hours to tell me what I'm doing wrong and how to fix it. But I'm just going to wait six months until the kernel people and the driver people have come to some kind of agreement and packaged the whole thing in one place for idiots like me who don't want to delve into the gory details.

So there.

Posted by wallich at February 22, 2004 08:10 PM