I’m now up and running a Linux distro on my Toshiba and managing to use WI-FI. It turned out to be much easier to setup WI-FI than I thought.
The Toshiba uses a RealTek card which isn’t well supported in any Linux distro I could find. I read all the docs I could find, the same with forum threads, checked under the hood of the laptop and then got to work…
On the bus to pick up a Linksys WUSB54GC USB dongle which worked right out of the box. That problem is solved. I’d prefer using the internal card, but eventually someone will make a working driver. It doesn’t have to be me.
The other part of the equation is the Sierra 881u USB wireless broadband card which still isn’t working. And that’s the reason I’m using Fedora. Not because it doesn’t work, but because I thought it might. It seems that Sierra includes some non-supported instructions for Linux on their site and suggest that a 2.6.23 kernel has been compiled with the right drivers and the 2.6.22 kernels haven’t. Fedora comes with 2.6.23, not so Ubuntu. Hence I’m running Fedora.
Of course it doesn’t really matter because neither allows me to run the dongle yet. I’m hopeful because at least it shows up, but I can’t get it to actually attach.
Enough for tonight though!
Aloha!