So I have been doing a bit of traveling in the US with my (relatively) new ASUS W7J laptop in hand. The laptop dual boots with Win XP and Kubuntu. My experiences with internet access surprised me a little.

Elizabethtown, Kentucky
Free wireless internet in the hotel works fine under linux.

Canton, Ohio
Free wireless internet in the airport and a locally owned coffee shop works fine under linux.

Sunnyvale, California
Free wireless internet in the hotel will not work with linux. I am forced to boot into XP.

San Fransisco, California
Wireless internet in the airport ($10 per day) will not work under linux. I am forced to boot into XP.

So in the heart of the Silicon Valley, the land of technology and diversity, I am forced to use XP to access the internet. In rural Kentucky and modestly urban Ohio, linux is OK.

I am pissed that XP is required by some who are selling or giving away internet access. I am surprised that the Silicon Valley is not more linux friendly.

Very interesting report. I am quite surprised at the ones charging for access rule what system you have to use.

I had an almost similar experience. I was in a hotel, and it usually need the WEP password to access the wireless, and then you needed to authenticate via the browser. At least in Windows. If you had Linux, no authentication was needed within the web browser

It seems strange that Linux wouldn't work in SF. I would have thought it would have been the similar of obtaining an address, and then when you attempted to browse, you had to send an SMS or whatever to pay the monies for using the service. But, then you never know how these things are working and what they're blocking.

Another data point I forgot to mention. The local airport here in rural Mississippi offers free wireless internet. It too works fine under linux.

My original post was supposed to be less of a rant and more of a question regarding what I can expect in the future during business travel. But as always most of what I have to say eventually sounds like a rant

It all depends on how they set up the wireless. If they use simple browser authentication, it's not usually OS-specific, but, that's not always the most secure way to do it...I'm not sure how the places that forced you into XP had it set up (VPN or something?).

I am not sure either. Under linux, KNetworkManager would simply not connect and eventually time-out.

which could just be a misconfiguration on your end. Access points dont do "os detection" at an association level, and 802.11 association is a standard well implemented under linux.

James

Could be I suppose.

Let me make clear what happened when I tried to connect in the San Fransisco airport. I could see the T-mobile access point. When I selected it from within KNetworkManager, the connection process would begin and then stall at 57%, eventually timing out.

Again, I had no trouble connecting in the local airport here in rural Mississippi.

This will be hard to diagnose without me returning to San Fransisco!

(k)networkmanager is behaving very strange (to say the least) with a few network interfaces.
You might wish to give wicd ( http://wicd.sourceforge.net ) a try - it is the new trend and is working damn fine...

networkmanager is just funny in general. It only ever shows one of the two networks I use at home, as well as a range of other odd maladies.

Filed bugs for them months ago now, but the developers have done sweet bugger all.

James

When scarecrow and iphitus make a recommendation, I tend to listen

I have removed network-manager and knetworkmanager.
wicd 1.3.1 has been installed.

I will be making a trip to Tampa, FL in November. Maybe Detroit, MI in a few weeks. We will see if my linux life on the road improves.....

Thanks for the recommendation.

As someone who heads into San Francisco at least three times per week, I rarely have any problems getting WiFi access while running Ubuntu or Kubuntu. The biggest issue I had was trying to get my Dell notebook and Ubuntu to play nicely together.

Cheers!

Maikeru Hatamoto