Are there any distros that automagically recognise pcmcia wireless cards in laptops?
Of course this would depend on the card, mine is the prism based WG511, for which I thought, or had heard said, that the 2.6.5 kernel had inbuilt support for.
Still, I recently downloaded a string of popular live cd based distros using that kernel and none have managed to recognise the card.
Anybody been successful getting pcmcia wireless to be automatically recognised?

Wireless is a bit sticky in Linux still. I don't think any distros (at least not any that I'm aware of) have terrific support for wireless devices "out of the box". I'm pretty happily using Gentoo with a Linksys wireless card and I'm working on getting it to recognize the Broadcom 1350 onboard wireless NIC on my Inspiron 9100 but it's been challenging.

I'd advise you to figure out how to get your card working in the distro you like. If it works in one, you can pretty likely get it working in another. But you'll need to google a lot and scour lots of online forums and mailing list archives.

Good luck,

Dave

Hi Dave,
Thanks for your reply. That coincides with my feeling, but every now and then, I check to see if any of the newer distros have managed to do it yet. Cheers.

have u tried knoppix 3.4..

Mandrake has fairly good support, as long as you are using an older 802.11b one, esp the prism/orinoco aircard and wavelan cards

Actually, I just checked out the latest KANOTIX. It does the business, totally without aid, on my WG511. That's the bughunter 2004.07 release I'm talking about. I'll check the Knoppix also, but generally Kano is always ahead of Knopper.