Knowing that I’d be travelling to Bali, I naturally brought my laptop with me but decided to also include my Raspberry Pi 400 so that I could test it out using the villa’s television set as a monitor. The set up for WiFi is that you first connect to a local IP address and, once connected, you then log in using the supplied user name and password. This is the same as what happens at Starbucks and McDonalds back in Jakarta.
There was no problem connecting with the laptop via the full fledged Chrome browser that is running under Mint Linux but the Raspberry Pi, running the default operating system, struggled mightily. The problem seems to be with the browsers. I tried both Chromium and Firefox ESR (which is not the full-fledged version of the browser) and each had problems with security. What should happen is that a login screen pops up and you can enter the user name and password. This did happen initially but then the connection dropped and I wasn’t able to get that login screen to come up again.
Setting up my iPhone as a hotspot, I was able to connect the Internet without any problems because all that’s required is the password, there is no intermediate step as with the villa’s WiFi. I’ve tinkered around and there’s no obvious solution: Firefox ESR and Chromium just aren’t keen on connecting to what they see as an insecure Internet connection. I don’t travel much these days and so this is not a deal breaker for me. When I return home to Jakarta, my Raspberry Pi will be working fine again but, for someone who spends a good deal of time on the road and wants to make use of hotel WiFi, this would be a major problem.
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