On Tue, 14 Aug 2007, Tim wrote: > On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 07:55 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > > please, no notes along the lines of "well, you might want to try > > *this* ..." i've "tried" a number of alleged solution -- now i'm > > ready for one that simply works. why is that such an unreasonable > > request? > > If you want new suggestions, you need to have provided a list of > what you've already done. We don't know what you don't know. no, that is precisely the *wrong* approach. (and, at this point, i'm actually addressing more general documentation shortfalls than just wireless.) there is little value in listing the 6 variations i've tried, just so someone can say, "here, here's a 7th possibility, maybe *that'll* work." the basic problem is that too much of this online documentation (and i'm referring to *way* more than wireless stuff at this point), simply gives a set of steps, with no discussion of a contingency plan if it doesn't work in the end. case in point: http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3014 note how the original poster confidently describes what should work, after which numerous respondents point out that the same steps didn't work for *them*. and i'm willing to bet that many of those respondents went back and spent time trying exactly the same thing *again*, with the same lack of success. and there was nothing to suggest that what worked for one person would fail for another, even with the same chip. that's why i'm such a big fan of HOWTOs that don't just list a series of steps but, after each step, they give a command or two you can run that will let you verify that things still look good, or that will immediately let you know it's going to fail and there's no point going any further. heck, i'm willing to write such a HOWTO as soon as i can figure out what i should be checking at each step as a test. a lot of this was discussed in an earlier thread but, in the end, even though everything *appeared* fine, once the configuration was done, i still couldn't get connected. so maybe there's really no way to do this after all. rday p.s. i might write up what i think i've established so far and post it to my wiki, so others can peruse it and tell me where i screwed up. maybe that will help narrow things down. -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA http://fsdev.net/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page ========================================================================
