[LUG] Connecting to wi-fi

[george parker <georgeparker20@xxxxxxxxx>]

I have an IBM Thinkpad T42 which I took last year to France and Spain to 
lots of camp sites for 6 weeks (Grey nomads and all that jazz) expecting 
to enjoy trouble-free surfing (the net that is).  I was running Debian 
based linux, Mepis, at the time.  I found that if it was free wi-fi that 
you just picked up, entered the given password and went with then it was 
impossible to get a connection.
If it was a pay site (all very expensive at 3 or 4 euros per hour) then 
you picked up a free network, went into firefox which went directly to 
the pay site for you to log in for your gold plated hour or whatever. 
This was always successful.  Being a Yorkshireman this made me very sad 
indeed.  With some of my expensive minutes I downloaded WICD which I had 
had some success with in the past and got very frustrating results.  I 
could find the networks with it and enter the passwords (usually WPA2) 
but after contemplating its navel it would time-out with the message 
"bad password", which it wasn't.
On getting home I got similar results with the wi-fi from my router. (I 
had been very remiss in the past using a wired connection to the 
laptop.)  I think that Debian based distros use netmanager.  I loaded 
PCLinuxOS onto the Thinkpad and lo and behold it connects to the wi-fi. 
No problem.  This uses a programme called network centre which is 
probably Redhat based.
This year, in a moment of madness, I loaded Mint Debian (testing) onto 
the Thinkpad and went off to my daughters on the way to France.  When I 
got to her pad, horror of horrors, (well, pretty predictable really) I 
couldn't connect to her wi-fi, with netmanger or WICD.  I then spent a 
day downloading PCLinuxOS (of course I didn't have the disk with me) and 
reconfiguring the damned laptop yet again.  The wi-fi was solid, which 
was more than could be said for my marriage.
I am sitting in my caravan in the South of France typing this (6 euros 
for 24 hours on this site) and I have been able to log on to several 
FREE sites en route.  On this site it seems to matter whether you use 
the mouse button or the ENTER key to log on but that is another story.
Am I the only one to have this sort of problem with Debian based 
distros?  Sorry for the length of post but I had to get the frustration 
off my chest.  Poitrine I believe in the local lingo.
Spain tomorrow I think so adios

George

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