[sf-lug] last night's meeting: getting wifi to work on a laptop

[Rick Moen]

Quoting jim (jim at well.com):

> 
> wifi. a good way to do this is to look at the 
> /var/log/dmesg file or to run the command 
> $ dmesg | less 

Since it's probably a PCI device, maybe lspci would be useful.
It very often is.

(Note that one reason a really current live CD is handy is that it has
built in a recent snapshot of Martin Mares's pci.ids file,
http://pciids.sourceforge.net/ .  If the device's PCI ID is too new to
be fully recognised by lspci, however, lspci will still give you the
numerical ID, which you can then look up online in Mares's list.)

>    the dmesg command presents the information 
> that's in the /var/log/dmesg file along with 
> some additional information gathered during 
> runtime. 
>    i recommend looking at the /var/log/dmesg 
> file: 
> $ less /var/log/dmesg 
> for the reason that the less program lets you 
> move up and down in the file, while piping 
> to less lets you move forward only. 

Huh?

"dmesg | less" works as intended, here.  If it doesn't on your system,
then you have something broken.

My current preferred live CD for general purposes remains (whatever's
the latest release at any given time of) Sidux.