Don't Understand
 

Hello all.

I have tried about 15 different linux distros and have to always come back to Mepis Linux because it is the only linux that works with wireless(Broadcom) right from the start. Can't get my wireless to work with any of the "major" versions of Linux. I can't understand why I can only find one that works....I know there are driver issues with some cards, but how can mepis get it to work, and no one else can? what are they doing?
mepis does not have the greatest documentation, and my sound does not work correctly, but my wireless does, so I keep installing various versions of linux, and just keep re-installing mepis......

just my thoughts.....

Apparently mepis comes with the appropriate wireless driver already installed. If you figure out which driver it is using, you should be able to install the same driver in any other distribution and have functioning wireless adapter.

I suggest that you get a ralink rtX based card. They work out of the box with most distros and there are also opensource drivers available at seamonkey. I suspect Mepis is including the firmware for the broadcom chipset in its distro when other distros are not.

Already have tried that
 

I have tried using the correct driver, but still no luck.
On my HP laptop, the front of the laptop has a light which indicates the wireless is active. It turns blue when active. When winxp is booting, you can see the light turn blue, meaning the driver has been activated. I can't get that to happen with Linux, except mepis linux.

When I searched for a driver that works in windows, all I could find was the .sys file and not a real driver. any suggestions for a good reference for getting wireless to work? I would really like to use another distro, other than mepis.

thanks

on your mepis system, if you run lspci, lsusb, lsmod etc you will be able to determine what driver it is using for the wireless card.

If you run iwconfig, you will see the wireless configuration.

It's not magic - you just have to dig into it.

For what it's worth, my laptop also has a light that should brighten when my wireless is active. I have never had the light function while in linux, and yet here I am :)

I'd be interested to know what ifconfig and iwconfig said about your wireless card in both your current distro and others.

I had my regular NIC device go out on my laptop and had to get wireless working on it. It didn't take too long. I used the bcm43xx driver in SuSE 10.3. If you have a regular wired NIC connection, there is even an "install_bcm43xx_firmware" that will download the needed firmware on the net. Then it is a simple matter of modprobing the bcm43xx driver and running YaST2 to configure wireless networking including the WPA-PSK encryption. If you do it manually, you need to read the bcm43xx_fwcutter's README file to learn that the *.fw files need to be copied to /usr/firmware.

Lately I've had problems getting ndiswrapper working. Previously the bcm43xx driver was limited to 10 mb/s and didn't support wpa but that is no longer the case, so it is usable now.