[TriLUG] Hotel wireless internet and Linux

[Rick DeNatale]

I spent the last three nights at a Courtyard by Marriott in Arlington
Virginia, and was frustrated because I couldn't get their free
wireless internet access to play with my Linux laptop.

KWifiMgr seemed to find lots of access points, most of these seemed to
have an essid of etwireless, but there was at least one linksys essid
listed as well.

But not of these seemed to want to talk to my laptop.  It seemed as if
they were using encryption (as I would suspect), but the party line
seemed to be that I should be able to bring up a web browser and
connect.

Is there some magic foo foo dust to allow a wep key to be given out? 
Is it windoze only foo foo dust?  Were there some other things I
should have tried with iwconfig or ifconfig or ...?