wifi

Now, the tablet has a built in wifi, with a little switch on the back (on/off).

It's a prism chipset, so it was found ok.

I don't rate the wifi settings panel(s). The big network panel (in settings) has a 'enable roaming' (which is a really stupid term if you ask me), but when [un]set, I can choose my [E]SSID, but only have a choice of 2 WEP and 2 WPA. I'm lazy, and live in the middle of nowhere, so my wifi is open (with access control, etc). No go.

[and it's confusing to have wifi and wlan0 in the panel - which is which eh?]

Toggling the roaming bit lets me choose an [E]SSID on the top menu bar wifi, and that lets me choose 'None' for security.

That connects happily, but no IP addresses, or traffic, etc. Here, I decide that the inbuilt wifi is too much hassle, so dig out my D-Link DWL-122 USB wifi key - which i'd been using with Win2k anyway - it seemed to be more stable.

[update: it seems the inbuilt wifi on/off switch was in fact off... ahem. Turning it on allows the inbuilt wifi to connect. Saying that, it only gets 1 bar, while the USB stick gets at least 3. So it's fixed, but not the best anyway... Of course, i'd expect a switch set to off to kind of 'vanish' the hardware, but hey...]

Plug in USB wifi key, wait. It appears as wlan0, enable roaming, enter details in the top panel widget, and it works. Connected up, all DHCP'd, good.

Load up firefox (3, beta 5) and i'm browsing. Good.

Run up the update manager, and it tells me ~18 things need updating. Off it goes, all done. Good.