Two and a half years ago when Apple made their infamous switch to Intel processors I called bullshit and got myself a cheap generic laptop to join the growing user base of Ubuntu Linux.
Everything worked as advertised, except for the built-in WiFi card. After jumping through many hoops I found a cheap plug-in WiFi adapter on eBay, but the whole experience left me feeling, well… something like this.
Cut to present day, and I’m the proud new owner (if a bit behind the curve) of a new Eee PC.
Just like a Mac, this Asus is a thing of beauty. It fits (barely) into my awesome Japanese man-bag and is a much better technological fit for me than Nokia’s Internet Tablet.
And everything works as advertised, except for one thing: The built-in WiFi.
See, I’ve got this awesome app on my Nokia called JoikuSpot, which basically turns my phone into a WiFi hotspot. It a great way to plow through at least some of my 6GB/month mobile data plan, and works amazingly well with both Mac and Windows computers.
But not, for some reason, with Linux — or at least this otherwise excellent implementation of it.
A kind soul has posted a helpful if kludgy solution which didn’t work at all for me. After almost an entire day of Googling, tweaking and frustration I’ve left a last-ditch call for help on the EeeUser forums. From there I’ll hopefully get some direction on how to proceed, but the whole experience has left me feeling… well, you know.
Despite the folks at Asus coming up with possibly the most user-friendly Linux UI yet, it doesn’t take much to pull back the curtain and find yourself face to face with a screen-full of indecipherable command-line gibberish as in the screen grab above.
What’s your verdict? Am I a total n00b who should just STFU and start learning terminal prompts, or is Linux still not ready for prime time?
