Over the past 8-10 years it seems that I try to get a Linux install up and running comfortably. Of course as time goes by, the system also changes as do the distros.

The last install I did was a Mandrake 9.x or something. All went well except that I could not get my wireless to work. That eventually lead to the removal.

Just yesterday I downloaded KANOTIX 2005 (1 cd boot) and to my surprise it worked without a hitch. In fact right off the disk eveything appears to be working perfectly; sound, wireless, battery charge, ACPI an everything. (video a little elongated due to the wide screen of the Sony notebook).

So I started looking for the best full blown distro and it appears that Suse 10.0 should meet my needs.

This morning I downloaded 10.0 and have burned the disks.

Here are some of my questions;

1) Is KANOTIX something unique that makes it work with my notebook?

2) Should I expect the same results from Suse 10.0?

3) Should I just wait for the Suse 10.1 distro?

4) Am I possibly overlooking another distro that has EXCELLENT hardware support?

Thanks for the help....

If your primary issue is your wireless card working, perhaps some more detail would help?

what model wireless card is it? whats the model/make of the machine?


If your live distro supports it, it is most likley possible to get it working with any distro, with a little bit of hacking.


You will want to find out what the card is, then search for native linux drivers for it. If you cant get it working with native drivers, perhaps you can get it to work with a windows XP driver, using Ndiswrapper.


Are there any other issues besides the wirless card?

Thanks for the fast reply.

It is a Sony VGN-S360 with Intel® PRO/Wireless 2200BG Network Connection (802.11b/g)3 wireless.

I have in the past tried the ndiswrapper and various other forms of getting things working, but all I end up doing is spending a lot of time with no success.

Honestly, I don't mind setting things up, but do not feel like hacking and hacking. Since KANOTIX had success with recognizing the hardware, I do know it's possible.

Right now I want to use the notebook for;

1) email and internet through wireless
2) OpenOffice

Once up and running;
3) Video and music (.avi and .mpeg)
4) possibly a windows terminal server client

Once I find a package, I will stay with it and put together a server for;
5) web serving
6) email

Thanks again for the help.

I took the jump with Suse 10.0. 2 small problems that were easily corrected.

1) Shrinking of my XP partition failed twice. No damage. By just doing a default shrink of the XP partition, it would just fail. So the third time I just went in and manually set the sizes. Actually didn't change anything, just saved. Somewhat odd, but it worked the 3rd time.

2) The wireless above was not recognized at first. I downloaded and installed ipw-firmware-5-7.noarch.rpm and everything worked perfectly.

So far I am extremely happy with everything.

1) Soundcard works perfectly
2) USB thumb drive and USB hard drive work perfectly
3) Video is awsome, smooth. (manually set the width)
4) Touchpad perfect. Works as it should.
5) Modem - don't know
6) Ethernet - don't know
7) Firewire - don't know
8) Powersave features - appear to - will be looking into it more

Very happy for now.