this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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I just broke out into a cold sweat remembering trying to get wifi to function on my netbook back in 2k8.
My friend, let me be that guy that says "that's nothing!". In 2002 (around kernel 2.14 I think it was) notebooks had no integrated wifi (at least not the second hand notebook I could afford, and it wasn't cheap anyway). I had to buy a cisco pmcia wifi card from across the world and recompile the kernel to include wifi support (and the driver of course). I don't remember why, but I remember that recompiling the kernel happened quite frequently. Maybe because I was distro hopping a lot or because there were quite (relatively speaking) kernel updates. Not good old days, but at least I learnt!
There was no DKMS back then (it appeared in 2003 and took a while longer to be adopted) so anything you wanted to add to the kernel and didn't have a ready-made binary module for your exact machine and distro had to come as a patch + recompile.
But you try to tell the young people today that... and they won't believe yah!
https://youtu.be/ue7wM0QC5LE?si=6qGRgsuMSx7NaA_D
Oh lord, the time I spent trying to get an Airport wifi card working on a dual-USB iBook in Slackware... shudder.