dreadedmonkeygod . net

Whiew! Done. On Monday night, I finally got around to installing XP on the Windows partition on my desktop machine at work. I (foolishly) thought this would be a simple operation.

Here's the short version: the WiFi card I had in that machine (a D-Link DWL-G520) was a fickle, intermittently-functioning bit of junk, even on its good days. I tinkered, I Googled, and the blasted thing still would't work. So I upgraded.

However, that was a royal pain in my patoot. Here's what I had to do:

• Do my homework: find out which cards are supported on Linux.
• Do my homework: find out which cards don't suck under Windows.
• Go shopping, in 104° heat, for one of the three cards that meet both of the above criteria.
• Get the card working on XP
• Try to get the card working on Linux, fail due to obscure side-effect of upgrading my kernel and gcc version.
• Upgrade my Linux installation to get kernel & gcc versions back in sync. (I was looking for an excuse anyway.)
• Get the card working on Linux.

This process took three days (Monday through Wednesday), and two nights out of my life. And I'm feelin' it: not enough sleep. 1am to 8am is not enough.

So I'm really thinking hard about setting up future machines with the bare minimum onboard. A tiny hard drive, no WiFi. I'll put large-scale storage on the network, and use "game adapters" that plug into the Ethernet port for WiFi access.

So much of this stuff is commoditized, and there's so little to be gained from integrating the WiFi access directly with the OS networking layer. Let's take the next step, and abstract it completely: the OS never knows whether it's working over WiFi or Ethernet. It all just looks like Ethernet to the OS. No drivers to fiddle with, no incompatibility issues between hardware versions and operating systems.

Anyway, tonight I'll build a new WiFi installation disc with the latest madwifi drivers and an installation script. I'll post the script here for posterity. (And so I can find it again in case I lose my install CD...)

The good news is that nothing spiraled out of control here. I've seen projects like this start with a new video card and finish with a completely new system. The whole thing progressed in fairly straight-forward fashion: XP to new WiFi card to new Linux drivers to upgraded Linux installation.