It's banner news day today. OK, I confess: I'm out sick from work and the decongestant I took is making me alternately bored of everything and intensely interested in the minutest of things. Tired but not able to sleep. You get the idea.

Anywa, if you're having troubles getting wireless networking going on a laptop (and you have a Lucent 802.11b card), try an app called KOrinoco.

I was fooling with networking last night and was having kind of a hard time. There's three ways to do anything, and some of it is very distribution-specific. And Red Hat includes two of the three ways, so I found myself editing two competing config files. I finally figured it all out, but is was a pain.

I came across this little KDE app and found that it greatly simplified getting it all working, especially if I want to change the setup to use different access points. It mimics the Windows app that comes with the wavelan cards. It also includes a cool little signal strength meter which docks into KDE's panel (again, like the one in the system tray on Windows).

I found the app from Jean Tourrilhes' WaveLAN page. If you don't have KDE, then look for the GNOME or E one I guess.

Oh yeah: One wrinkle I found was that the only way to get past those "network unreachable" errors was to hard-code a gateway IP in /etc/sysconfig/network. I was hoping DHCP would set that up, but I guess not (I may have DHCPCD configured wrong, though). I'm probably going to make a tiny shell script or something that changes the wavelan preset and that file at once.