Is there any program I can get that will make it easy? (Don't shoot me... but...) I want it Windows easy. I want it to find the network and all I have to do is either access it or type in my password. Or am I just doing this whole thing wrong?


I have tried several distributions but none of the distributions make it clear on how to get wireless working. Some recognize my hardware, some do not. LAN always works.

Mandriva has an excellent Network Control Centre that just scans what networks are available and you can just click and enter WEP keys etc if applicable. You can choose to set-up a wireless interface and if you need to install firmware it will tell you where and how to get it.

It's a doddle. Mandriva is just brilliant for this kind of thing.

What network card do you have?

The GNOME Desktop includes a program called network-admin, which is a gui front-end to a few other programs. It is located (in Ubuntu at least) under System -> Administration -> Network.

Another program I like is Wireless Assistant. It displays detected networks and can connect by clicking on it.

Both of these work really well for open networks (like at a coffee shop), or even WEP, but they might stumble on WPA or WPA2.

Have you tried these, or something similar? If yes, but it didn't work, you may need to initially configure your system to work with your hardware for windows easy connections later.

If you have used a gui, but it didn't seem to work. Try:
where wireless device is something like wlan0, ath0, eth1 or whatever. I believe that is the Gentoo way.

On debian (ubuntu) based systems, you can try:
where the ath0 is your device.

Mandrivia is the one that worked best. (I think I actually got it working) but it was too slow on my computer (I think that XP actually was faster)

I have a Dell 100L latitude which has a Dell Wireless 1350 WLAN Mini-PCI card by Broadcom

Yes, I can get it to register in Gentoo. (Eth0, eth1, on varius times) But (and i had GNOME) The Network-admin didn't seem towork. Anyways, I'm working on XP right now- but I'll try the wirless Assistant.

Once you had it working on Mandriva, you'd surely have been better off posting on the Mandriva subforum here or one of the Mandriva-specific forums to get it going faster. It seems a shame that you did actually have it working but just needed to tweak something to get it going. Chances are someone in the Mandriva world has come across this and knows how to fix the speed issue.