I’ve had an Acer Aspire One netbook for a couple of years (£120, ex-display model bought off Amazon). They seem to be quite|popular|amongst library folk.
It was delivered with the Fedora-based Linpus Lite operating system, which I found perfectly up to the job. I’ve found ways of making most of the changes I wanted to make, and I’ve learned a little bit about Linux along the way.
That was until the University of Lincoln introduced Eduroam. (Eduroam is a service that allows you to connect to a wireless network and use the Internet while you are visiting other universities and colleges in the UK, using your Lincoln credentials to log in.)
Linpus Lite did not want to connect to Eduroam.
When I tried to connect to Eduroam on my netbook, it presented me with a ‘WLAN Settings’ window, and a drop-down box to select an ‘Encryption type’. Trouble was, the drop-down box was empty and the ‘Connect’ button greyed-out. I was stuck at this point.
I tried following the instructions on the ICT Support Desk site, without success. A colleague in ICT suggested I was missing an ‘802.1x supplicant‘. I asked around, and tried to install one, again unsuccessfully.
So I’ve given up on Linpus Lite, and—following Chris Leach’s example—installed Ubuntu 11.04 as an alternative OS. It’s far better supported than Linpus, with a much bigger user community.
It does seem to run rather slower than Linpus Lite (which was designed specifically for small devices like netbooks), but Chromium is still lightning-fast on this OS.
And it connected to Eduroam straight away using the following settings:
- Wireless security: WPA & WPA2 Enterprise
- Authentication: Protected EAP (PEAP)
- Anonymous identity: [leave blank]
- CA certificate: (None) – or you can ask ICT services for the ‘AddTrustExternalRoot.cer’ file
- PEAP version: Automatic
- Inner authentication: MSCHAPv2
- Username: [your University of Lincoln accountID@lincoln.ac.uk]
- Password: [your normal University password]
