I originally tried Ubuntu, which at the time was in it’s Breezy Badger release. There were a few hardware compatibility problems, and I couldn’t connect to the Pitt network with the available software, so I switched to Debian. Debian had a more updated version of XSupplicant, which, at the time, was the only available client with which one could use Linux with Pitt’s required 802.1x authentication set up.

Getting XSupplicant running was a struggle the whole way, but eventually I had it up and running. It worked for about a week and then just stopped working, and nothing I could do.. reinstalling, reconfiguring, etc, could get it working on the network again.

Eventually I gave up trying. Recently, however, my laptop fell upon hard times and had to be fixed again (this was a fiasco. Maybe I’ll write about it sometime). When I got it back I decided to try again.

I put in a 120GB hard drive, set up Windows XP (which always needs to be loaded first, it seems if you want to dual-boot. XP doesn’t like to share), and then installed Ubuntu’s latest release. Luckily, there’s a fork of XSupplicant called wpa_supplicant, which works much better, and some enterprising Pitt students had written a nifty little connection script to help get it going.

After using the lappy for a week or so under Ubuntu, I decided that thing had been stable enough and got to setting things up on the my desktop computer as well. I put in a 250 GB drive I had kicking around (yes, I had a 250 GB drive, far larger than any other hard drive I have, just kicking around), and dropped Ubuntu on that machine too.

Overall, the switch is going well. I’m still using XP for job search stuff, as I just can’t seem to make my resume look as good in Open Office as it looks in Word. Also, when I start playing online poker seriously again, I’ll probably still use XP on the desktop for that, as I doubt that PokerOffice would run very well under Wine.

The only real complaint I have so far is that I can’t get my laptop’s wireless card running. That’s my next project as far as this stuff goes…