[olug] is it just me?

[Neal Rauhauser]

 I've got SuSe 9.2 on my laptop and more and more I'm feeling like its 
just a fancy skin over a Microsoft product.

 Case in point: how do you change SSID from the command line? Its not in 
ifconfig like it is for BSD. There are a dozen conflicting pages found 
via google and none seem to apply to my vanilla SuSe install. I searched 
for 'wireless' with YaST, I installed the things I found, and they 
mostly don't behave - kwifimanager is in a world of its own, and no 
command line utilities seem to be included. I have vague memories of 
SSID being set on install of the kernel module for the card, but that 
seems to be the 'other' Aironet driver, not the one that works with my 
A/B/G Aironet card.

 Yes, YaST will do it ... eventually ... but I'm not willing to wade 
through menus and wait sixty seconds every time I want to change SSID - 
I'm playing with multi SSID features on a Cisco AP tonight and simple 
tasks should be accomplished *simply*.


 BSD, it is *so* much more difficult - ifconfig an0 ssid whatever and 
you're done. Status? wicontrol for prism cards, ancontrol for Cisco. 
Text  based tools, good man page, man page sends you somewhere else if 
it isn't the right thing, google and there is *one* answer that is true 
through time, not a plethora of competing methods that vary on a distro 
by distro basis.

 SuSe feels for all the world like Windows NT 4.0 - a fine idea gone 
terribly wrong in subtle ways. They're trying to cater to the legions of 
Windows admins out there and they're losing most of what made Linux good 
in the first place, just like Redhat did around 2000.

 I've got a spare laptop drive. FreeBSD 5.4 is going on this laptop so I 
can get some work done ...