HI


I need a distro compatible with my rt2500 wifi card.

I can't install a distro to my HDD so I need somethingnthat can run from LIVECD.


I also need it to be capable of easily specifying boot parameters to set memory size at the CD's boot up screen as my ram is faulty and that parameter fixes it.


Please help.

The RT2500 card is absolutely the easiest possible wirelees setup. Newer kernels include the drivers. Pick your distro, and don't worry about your rt2500.

But recently I have been trying to get my network card to work in puppy linux and knoppix and still no luck.

I actually posted a topic on here about it.

By the looks of things the drivers are installed already installed but WEP and WPA don't seem to work.


It looks too complicated to install the driver from a LIVECD so I think I'd be better off with some distro that I can be sure supports WEP and WPA.


After all the trouble of trying to set it up, any help here is muchly appriciated.

Google "rt2500 wep linux"

You could try adding your Distro, but Puppy isn't exactly a biggy, and it may or may not be too limiting.

Like Rickh told you the rt2500 drivers are already present in the linux kernel, hence in most if not all distributions. You are going to have trouble with wpa in any distro.

There is a Tempestuous tutorial in the Puppy forum explaining how to connect to wpa but I've had no success.

Ndiswrapper is an option and I use it with rt2500usb to connect wpa and it works very well. The only catch with ndiswrapper and rt2500 is that you need to blacklist the linux rt2500. Unfortunately, the windows drivers are named the same so you may need to change the name of the linux driver before you blacklist it. So ... you need to find rt2500.ko and change it to rt2500bad.ko and then blacklist rt2500bad without the .ko.

Now ... hold on. Puppy is easy with ndiswrapper. Go to "configure startup of puppy" > blacklist a module > move the rt2500 module left to right. Now you can go ahead and configure your windows drivers with ndiswrapper via network wizard.

The problem is that linux will load the kernel driver first in almost every situation even if you have installed the ndiswrapper driver.

Hope this is not too confusing.

I googled my brains out before I even joined this forum and no luck. Anyway I have figured out how to specify boot parameters in ubuntu now so anyway it's fine, even though ubuntu tells me I'm only getting 5MB/s.