Kanotix recognized both my netgear card (prism54 driver) and my son's d-link card, can't remember what driver right now. No ndiswrapper used, just configured from the menu.

For the record, I have ATI 200 Xpress on my 64 bit, AC97 sound on the 32 bit, and an rt2500 chipset wireless card on the laptop (32 bit) All work flawlessly, but it didn't get there without a few headaches. I recommend Debian, but I'm sure a little patience and determination will make your hardware equally efficient regardless of the distro.

I've found the same thing. I have a Belkin F5D7000 card (RaLink RT2500 chipset) and am using NDISWrapper (didn't realise there was a Linux driver for it when I got it). When I use the card under Windows, it disconnects from the network every so often, but under Linux it stays connected. Other machines in the house (all running Windows) experience the frequent disconnections, so I thought it was the router at first. If it was, that wouldn't explain why in Linux I don't lose my connection :/.

Also just want to mention that I installed FreeBSD 6.0 on my machine about a week ago and it comes with a driver for RT2500 based cards, so mine worked straight away. Yes I know this isn't Linux related, but wanted to mention it anyway .

BELIEVE me, I completely understand your frustration! Everyone has it, from the greenest linux Newbie to the most experienced linux/unix server admin. I was just tellin' ya don't give up. Remember, THAT's what BILL WANTS!

Funny thing happened at work the other day that illustrates this point. I work for a company of about 35 people, a software company. Our IT guy (one dude, not a team) is a swissarmy knife of an admin... linux/unix/windows etc. etc. We have a CRM that is run on a Solaris box, and the licensing fees were getting a bit onerous for it, so he decided to transition it over to a Linux box instead. He set it up, got everything working, except one thing: every now and then it would reboot. Not the app, but the SERVER would reboot. He was pulling his hair out for days, all of us were throwing our two cents in as to what could be the problem, nothing was working.

Finally, he was almost ready to go back to the Solaris solution before, paying for it and all.

Until he realized that there was one other change he had made when switching to linux... he'd moved the server about 12ft accross the room... and the wall it was against happened to be backed up against the elevator machinery shaft. He moved it back, no problems ever since.

Computing is a weird thing, but there's always an answer, I'm convinced!

-olly

I have a laptop with ralink wireless and a desktop with a dlink dwl520 with the artheros chipset.

Both are plug and play with PCLinuxOS.

Mepis and Stx also handle the dlink perfectly.

For some strange reason, reception is better with linux than with Xp on both machines.

Wireless is my only internet at this time so I've been spending time tweaking and testing. We share a satelite connection in the community we have moved to.

and what about the GUI? how can I see witch wireless LANS are available in Ubuntu? Ubunto recognise my card but I dont know how to look for wireless... like in windows.. we see witch ones are available and just a double click and we connect.. how can I do that in linux?

Try using GTKWifi. Works pretty well for me.

thanks!! im gonna try that

that is a very cool program! but I still have a problem! linux ask me for my WEP key but I dont use WEP, I use WPA-PSK... what do I have to do to access my wireless lan?

I can't help with that. I'm currently using WEP. I was able to use WPA-PSK when I was using Zenwalk, but ran into other issues with that distro. I needed to get it up and running for school, so I had to jump over to a more newbie friendly distro, and I can't get WPA-PSK working for me now.

If you get it working, please post what you do.

I found a HOWTO..

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthre...hlight=WPA-PSK

but I still dont manage to get it to work... dont know witch driver to use, and where it says "ath0" what is that? what sould I put? my wireless is on "eth1"

Sorry I can't offer much assistance. I think that the ath0 is what their wireless card was named. For your setup, that would be eth1. Of course I could be wrong. I am in no way a Linux expert.

and the driver? i didnt istall any driver because when I installed ubuntu recognised my wireless card and it works good.. but cant use it :s

I'm just starting linux and I need some serious help.

My built-in wireless card is a Broadcom 802.11 b/g WLAN (at least, that's what it says under connection options in Windows). I have used half a dozen distros and none of them pick it up. Like I said, new to linux, and I'm sure there are some things I can do, but I can't seem to get linux to recognize it no matter what I do. Any help is greatly appreciated.