I’ve previously lamented the flakiness of the uath USB Atheros WLAN driver in OpenBSD 4.1. I’m happy to report that I’ve found a suitable alternative: the Ralink 2500-based Alfa AWUS036S.

As a part of the ongoing wireless saga, I’ve grown weary of the difficultly of running the early-beta rt2x00 drivers, so I thought I’d chance OpenBSD 4.0 on hera. Though OpenBSD 4 doesn’t support WPA (a huge shortcoming IMHO) it does have famously good wireless support. Since Ubuntu is basically useless on hera, I wanted to repave her with OpenBSD 4.

Problem: hera has no LAN connectivity. She was made (c. 1997) before on-board Ethernet was invented, and the aging Intel cardbus adapter I have is very flaky.