Low maintenance distro? that works with my wifi card?
 

Hi,

I currently have ubuntu 10.4 LTS on an Acer Aspire. I can't get my wireless card to work with it properly and I have got rather fed up of ubuntu where the stock response to any problem is "upgrade, upgrade, upgrade!" even though each successive upgrade has in fact made things WORSE not better.

I wouldn't count myself as I newbie (I learnt *nix 15 years ago) but I don't have time so I want something that doesn't need or want tweaking and upgrading every 10 minutes. It also has to work with my network card (Atheros AR5007EG which is supposed to work with the ath5k driver).

Suggestions? Anything else I should consider?

Thanks

I personally use Debian, which is the "upstream" of Ubuntu. Slow-moving, low-maintenance, and very stable. (The current Debian Stable is quite comparable to Ubuntu 10.04 in many ways.)

I am not familiar with your wireless card but I found this: http://wiki.debian.org/ath5k

I also like Debian. It's my second favorite after Slackware. If you value stable over bleeding edge, you can't go wrong with either of them.

I can't speak to the wireless card. All my computers with wireless have Broadcom. Lucky me.

crunchbang -debian based distro with wireless drivers and stuff..

Slackware is great if you want to set it up once and just use it. I'd recommend Slack with XFCE. KDE is also available, but XFCE is lighter and less prone to weird problems. Also, I recommend wicd for your network cards. Ubuntu uses NetworkManager, which drives me crazy.

Slack + XFCE + WiCD == solid

Your mileage may vary tho...

I agree with the previous posters, Slackware or Debian will surely work with your atheros card (I've always had atheros cards in my laptops and they've always worked smoothly with both slack and debian).

Both are very stable and slack is way more low-maintenance.

If you're still there, this does seem to be a problem card. The answer may be ndiswrapper and the Windows driver.

Honestly, I'd say... upgrade ;) 10.04 is getting a little dated, and hardware support keeps improving with every release. 12.04 (the next LTS release) might be what you want.

If not... Crunchbang has a very nice auto-setup script, and Mint is pretty good at detecting/working with most hardware. Debian and the others can certainly do it... I just don't think that with 2013 around the corner that I should have to spend excessive amounts of time manually digging through scripts to get a wireless driver working, personally. If the distro can't handle that much automagically... NEXT...

Thanks for the responses. Haven't decided what to do yet. Started out on Slack so maybe I should just go back there eh?