Hi i have mandriva linux 2006 with an Acer TravelMate 290 laptop which works beautifully with linux apart from its a bit hard to get the wireless internet to work.

I have an Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG WLAN thing on my laptop that I have installed all the files correctly and mandriva detects it but I need help setting it up correctly through the mandriva control center because when i get to the end where it says 'Do you want to allow users to start this connection?' and I click next the setup thing just hangs.

Also if i type iwconfig in a terminal window it takes forever to show which connections are wireless.

Please help me.

Sounds familiar to me!! Grrr!!! Grrr!!!

I am holding my breath, last week on Linux news, the company which allegedly developed wireless drivers for many wireless cards announced it was converting the drivers to open source, and they allegedly are going to be available to put into kernels in a few weeks, just as the wireless card drivers are. I can hardly wait. That will be really neat if it's not a hoax. Do be alert for it in case it is true.

I'm switching to Ubuntu Linux. It's rated number 1 Linux distribution plus I found a full set of high detailed instructions of installing the wireless network properly from www.debuntu.com

There is no way I can wait for wireless to work on Linux properly. I've had enough of using Windows to use the internet!

You need the firmware. Download the firmware, put the files in /lib/firmware

If, by chance, you give up on Mandriva, both SuSE 10.0 and 10.1 work with the Intel 2200BG ootb. WPA as well. Or at least they do on my Sony Vaio with the Intel 2200BG.

In Ubuntu Dapper (I'm quad booting SuSE 10.1, Ubuntu, Fedora 5, and Windblows atm) all I had to do was install network-manager and gnome-network-manager. In Ubuntu I have to enter my keyring password each time I boot up, but otherwise it works fine. Ditto fedora although I had to download a later version of the firmware.