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Comment by inDigiNeous | Hacker News Reader

Oh man. I had already forgot about ISDN4Linux. Spent two weeks just getting the ISDN working, writing scripts, compiling the kernel. Imagine nowadays spending 2 weeks to get online, reading HOWTOs, having to write shell scripts (to dial the ISP and hangup) just to get basic functionality ..oh yeah that's wifi and linux these days ;)

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Is wifi still that bad, though? I (personally) haven't seen any wifi problems in the wild for at least 5 years.

I just spent 3 hours this week fighting the iwlwifi driver and my Intel 7265-D card. Turned out power saving mode was causing all the drops (iwconfig $iface power off).

funnily, I had the same network dropping issue due to wifi power saving on windows 10

Depends on your environment, I have a stupid wall between my router and my desk. The signal is losing ~20 dBm going through that wall. That sucks.

Well, at least Linux is not to blame for that. Or so I hope. °^_^

Just got a new work machine, trying to get external ASUS usb wifi working, no luck, drops the signal like in 1-3 minutes after going live. Tested all the power saving tricks and so on, no luck, gave up.

Hehe, ISDN was the reason I started out on SuSE Linux. After a few years I tried installing Debian, but I managed to render the system unbootable trying to get it to work.

Man, ISDN was a pain. But it was nice to be able to see a log of incoming (including missed) calls in the log file. ;-)

(By comparison, Wifi via NetworkManager has pretty much "justed worked" for me.)

I got ISDN to work in Debian Woody out of the box. I had a ISDN internet flatrate back than, which even included the 2nd B channel. 128 Kbit/s, for me that was huge in 2000.

I was a bloody n00b back then, I had almost no clue what I was doing. A while later I managed to get a dial-on-demand-ISDN-router working using NetBSD, with NAT and all. That was a lot fun, and I learnt some things along the way. (It helped a lot that some friendly soul at the NetBD project had written a tutorial how to do exactly that.)

Before ISDN, I had a 14.4kbit modem, so even single-channel ISDN at 64kbit was amazingly fast back then, to me. Dialing was faster with ISDN, but you did not get those cool sounds modems made. I still get nostalgia when I have to deal with fax devices and hear them screech. ;-)

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