[GLLUG] Browser Follies

[Chick Tower]

I spent almost the whole afternoon at a car repair shop getting my car's 
exhaust system fixed.  They provided encrypted wireless access, using 
WPA.  I had trouble using it, though, depending on what program I tried 
to access external sites with.  I am wondering if anyone has any ideas 
on why that might be.

On Arch Linux, I tried Midori, Dillo, uzbl, lynx, links, elinks, and 
w3m.  I don't use Firefox, Chromium, or Konqueror on this laptop because 
it only has 128MB of RAM, and Midori and uzbl sometimes exceed the PC's 
resources.  Of those browsers, only Midori, uzbl, and links were 
successful; the other browsers said they couldn't resolve the domain 
names I tried.  I could always ping sites, but curl and wget didn't 
work, and I only specified http URLs for them.  Gpodder couldn't connect 
to the internet, either.  I ran a traceroute and it seemed to find the 
site I specified, although I don't remember what it was.

On CrunchBang Linux, I tried an older version of Midori (#! is based on 
Debian, after all), chimera2, and I think w3m.  The older Midori 
couldn't resolve names, w3m failed again, but chimera2 worked.  I only 
installed and tested chimera2 to see if it could work; it's the last 
(Linux) web browser I would recommend to anyone, and I doubt it's being 
developed any more.  Gpodder also failed, but I didn't try curl or wget.

It doesn't seem to be a matter of which browsers allow cookies and which 
don't.  There isn't a sign-on or announcement screen like at the public 
library.  I've known links to fail at the library while elinks worked, 
and I think it's because elinks accepts cookies, but today the situation 
was reversed for those two.

So, does anyone have any guesses as to what the problem was?  If not, 
it's no big deal; I don't plan on spending much time there.  I'm just 
curious.
-- 

                                Chick