I was dual-booting Ubuntu on my laptop for a while, and was never able to get the built-in wireless card to work. Mind you, this was an extremely generic, run-of-the-mill card (I forget the manufacturer offhand, but I do recall that it was the first name to pop up when I googled “generic wireless card adapter”)…which means that there’s almost certainly a working Linux driver for it somewhere on the ‘Net. Right? Nope. I found a bunch of drivers that people said might work with it, but none of them did. I even had an old Linksys wifi card that I tried as well: there were “drivers” for it everywhere…yet none of them worked, either. Mind you, both cards worked fine–and still work fine–in WinXP.

All told, my experiences with Linux have been universally bad–mainly because of driver issues. Take this with a grain of salt, however, as this was last summer that I was doing this, and no doubt the situation has improved greatly since then, what with Ubuntu gaining in popularity so much in the past six months. Nonetheless, that Heiny bet stands.

I still find it very weird that there’s so much trouble getting Linux to work with wifi cards. HOW many people are part of the Open Source development community these days? I could understand if there weren’t drivers available for some esoteric piece of ultra-proprietary hardware whose driver specs are guarded more carefully than Fort Knox…but ultra-generic wifi card? Seriously, Double You Tee Eff?