ArgentSilver

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So I want to try fooling around with a live CD on my new laptop (Gateway MX6958) to check out compatibilities. I would LIKE to be able to connect to my WAP, which is setup for WPA-PSK, without having to install (as yet) to the hard drive and start the headache-inducing process (YMMV but that's my experience) of trying to configure wpa_supplicant by CLI. The laptop has the Intel Pro 3945abg wireless chip. Does anyone know of a live CD distro that has a gui config for WPA that would let me do a quick check?

stress_junkie

www.pclinuxos.org

Excellent wireless adapter configuration tool.

portamenteff

<br>

www.kanotix.org
this distro has the Knoppix style compression. It comes with network card configuration, this includes wireless, and wep/wpa-psk support. It's hardware detection is pretty good.<br>
I also like slax. It has these modules where you can custom build your live cd os for whatever type of trial you wish to give your notebook. www.slax.org

jacook

Yeah PCLinuxOS is good but I love Kubuntu, for wireless internet WPA support is included

http://www.kubuntu.org/

hope this helps

Jake

pwabrahams

I'm running Kubuntu Edgy Eft 6.10, and if support for WPA-PSK is included, it's well concealed. A visit to kubuntu.org yielded nothing useful for solving the problem. I'm running kubuntu as an experiment, since normally I've been using OpenSuSE, which supports WPA very handily, so references to yet another distribution aren't terribly useful to me. I should mention that OpenSuSE's YAST solves a number of other configuration problems also, such as how to set up the GRUB loader and how to get rid of that irritating bouncing cursor. Reminds me of the despised paperclip in Microsoft Word.

ArgentSilver

I had actually given up the idea of running WPA from a live CD, concluding that nobody did it. I went ahead and installed Ubuntu Edgy on my Gateway as a dual boot.

Then I was fooling around with the new Mepis 6.5 release candidate the other day (RC3 now I believe), and popped open the Mepis Network Assistant, plugged in my WPA key and my jaw dropped when it quietly connected to my WAP with no further ado! Apparently the driver for my Intel 3945 chipset was built-in and I didn't have to futz around with wpa_supplicant either!

Not only that but my widescreen 1280x800 display was immediately supported, so my desktop looked 100% better right away. Needless to say, I immediately retired the Ubuntu installation and stuck Mepis on there instead. Ironic that Mepis is based on Ubuntu, but has better details as defaults. I've been very impressed! I've since discovered that I can take the live Mepis CD and run it on my at-work laptop also (which has a troublesome Broadcom wireless chipset). It's not as straightforward because that won't work with the native driver and requires ndiswrapper, but I found that with a short shell script I can connect to the open access point there too, and save that between uses on the Mepis desktop-to-go with a USB stick.

Mepis is cool!