Recap:
Quite a challenge getting a table. (Rumor is that electricity is shut off on campus).
But by 1 pm all were able to sit down at the big table.
Juan brought by a laptop running Trisquel Linux which is a "free" version of Ubuntu. I.e. Ubuntu with
all binary blobs removed.
Problem was WIFI not working. We went down the wrong path at first but eventually solved the problem.
The mistake was mis-identifying the wireless card. We started looking at a device which was actually the
Ethernet. And a bunch of stupid stuff was tried (my fault -- I need to be smarter)
So, what finally worked: USB tether to the phone and run apt update the apt upgrade.
Run lspci to determine the wireless hardware. It is an Artheros chip using the ath9k module. This is
supposed to be completely open and blob-free.
dmesg | grep ath9k shows the card detected and a network interface created.
But Network Manager is not showing any networks!
Next I wonder if the wireless radio is turned off so I try to run rfkill but rfkill was not installed.
But still thinking maybe the radio is off and look around and find the physical wireless switch!
All that run-around and it was just a switch on the front.
On other news Ubuntu 19.10 released. It comes with kernel 5.3 which among other stuff has
improved support for Atom Baytrail CPU's
I will try it on one of my convertible Baytrail tablets. Let you guys know how it works.
I have Arch Linux running on one and it is very nice. But it would be good to get it running with
Ubuntu as the install is much easier esp. for the noobie.
Thomas