A love letter to my wife.

My dearest Merrystar,

I love thee so much that I will spend my evenings trying to get your wireless card working under Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3, then trying to get the USB pen drive recognized under RHEL 3, and then trying to get an ethernet connection under RHEL 3.

And when that fails, I will direct thee to the following websites, to download drivers, and tarballs, and other assorted installation items, so that even though I could not aid thee in thy quest for wireless access under the great bloated behemoth that is really Red Hat Linux 9, but rebranded and patched for a $179 license that your employer would rather pay, I will present thee with divers instructions as to how I think you can install ndiswrappers around the included Windows drivers and activate your divinely sweet portable computing device’s intrinsic radio networking capabilities.

Why? Because I love thee, my darling, my beloved, and nothing - not even the havoc that Red Hat hath wreaked upon our lives - will keep me from faithfully serving you, my angel, my evening star, my ashke. I will be thy Teleporno, thy Celeborn, grandson of Elmo the ticklish, for all the days of my life. Except without the dirty name.

And now, the promised instructions.

1. Download the NdisWrapper tarball.
2. Locate the windows drivers for the Intel Pro 2100 3B wireless card. These are either on the original source CDs that came with Tsiolkovsky, or you can get them from the web at ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/TravelMate_80x/driver/winxp/intel2100b.zip.
3. Follow the installation instructions.
4. Configure the wireless card according to some of the notes on the distros page. I would set wlan0 to eth1. You’ll need to specify both the WEP key (in /etc/syconfig/network-scripts/keys-eth1 and ifcfg-eth1) and ESSID, but I’ll send those to you under separate cover.
5. Ping rice.edu.
6. Do a little happy dance if it works.

Love,
Your Luke