which distros ship with wpa out of the box?

rafc · 01-28-2007, 11:55 AM

I'd like to know what choices I have when I want to choose a distro that has WPA (psk) capability out of the box. Without first having to connect to the internet (

) to download the program that will take care of WPA.
I've heard suse has this. Are there others?

rafc · 01-29-2007, 04:40 AM

Ok, I think mint also provides wpa support if I read it correctly. I still don't understand why most distros don't.

lurko · 01-29-2007, 06:14 AM

uhh, I think that would have everything to with whether your hardware is fully supported or not.

dasy2k1 · 01-29-2007, 10:21 AM

AFAIK most distros come with WPA support out of teh box, what most lack is support for atheros chipsets in wifi cards (very populiar chip)

why they dont bundle this baets me as teh code for teh driver (madwifi) is GPLed

Hangdog42 · 01-29-2007, 03:28 PM

Slackware has a wpa_supplicant package in the extras directory. It isn't installed by default, but it is easy to add once you've got a system running.

Quote:

why they dont bundle this baets me as teh code for teh driver (madwifi) is GPLed

The problem is that it isn't entirely GPL'ed. There are bits and pieces (HAL in particular) that are rather confusing from a GPL standpoint. Have a read here for some basic info, but the upshot is that the licensing has been confusing enough that most distros don't want to touch it.