I was just wondering(without alot of technical terminology) what Linux distros have wifi.



Thanks,


Lori Morse

Most distributions have wifi or can be configured to support WiFi. I assume the real question is what distribution supports my WiFi hardware automatically or what we term support it out of the box. No one can say unless you post the make and model of your computer or if wireless is not built in the make and model of the USB or PCI wireless adapter.

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These days they all support wifi, it would be suicide not to.
If you are looking for a distro, try any 'live' system to see if it supports your wifi 'out of the box', else check the website of the distro you like the look of.

Yea, i already looked through some of the distros, it doesn't tell me if it is wifi or not, that is why i am asking on this site.

I will go out on a limb and say any desktop-oriented linux system will support wifi out of the box. if you are pretty new to linux, the ubuntus would be a good place to start, as they offer relatively broad wifi support in a relatively easy to use package. for the most part the ubuntus are designed with the non-techie user in mind.

The main issue with most wifi's is that they require firmware, which is not installed by default on many distros. The kernel has drivers for select (most) chipsets. There's even ndiswrapper to use the windows drivers on rare instances. You can check the package management system of a distro for things like wpasupplicant, wireless-tools, and other things. But there's really no way to know with certainty without installing and using a distro.

I tend to bypass wifi drivers and tools by having a router that takes care of that portion that I ethernet into. It makes installation of most distros easy. An asus rt-n12 is like $40-ish and has 4 ethernet ports for client connections. I can get my wifi on my laptops to work on most distros, but each has their quirks.

My dell inspiron 1150 requires different firmware than what the distro suppies:
http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources...0.10.5.tar.bz2
My usual debian supplies broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2 by default which is unreliable for my chipset.

My hp stream 11 requires newer sources for the kernel module:
https://github.com/lwfinger/rtlwifi_new
to work reliably. And the firmware-realtek package.

Both chipsets do work with what's supplied, but getting them to work with the defaults is so quirky and fails to maintain a connection for long durations like the other options. But they do kind of work out of the box, with the appropriate packages installed. YMMV

I found Linux Mint would tend to install non-free firmware. There is also a Debian installer with non-free firmware which I managed to use on my laptop though, sorry, I don't recall the URL.

If you have a choice, stick to machines that use the Intel wireless chipsets. Those generally work out of the box on almost any Linux distro, including "server" distros like CentOS.

Wifi for what hardware exactly? Without a lot of technical terminology.

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??? is there one that has NO wi-fi support at all ?
Supported OS's that is

RH3 predates so....( NOT rhel3 but RH3 )

1 members found this post helpful.

Hi Lori...

Welcome to the forum

To be able to answer your question better, in terms of Linux support for your wireless adapter, please open a terminal and copy and paste this command to the terminal...

Then hit your "enter" key and copy and paste the results to your next post here.

Also, just FYI, you might want to consider changing your username, otherwise you're looking at the good possibility of getting a boatload of SPAM in the very near future.

Thanks!

2 members found this post helpful.

Thanks for the help. I will try what you suggest, in the mean time here are my computer specs: laptop is an hp 15, it has windows 8 on it and I installed ubuntu 10.10 on it. I know the ubuntu is pretty old- i am in the process of getting a newer version. So, if the computer had wifi with windows 8 would I still need an adaptor because linux doesn't have the hardware? Any advise you can offer will be helpful!


Thanks,


Lori

That question doesn't make sense. The machine has the hardware (including the wifi adapter), the operating system just uses it. Windows 8 was able to use the wifi adapter in your computer, Linux may or may not be able to (it probably will, but it might take some effort, see the above posts).

Here comes the technical jargon part you are dreading so much.

https://wireless.wiki.kernel.org/

The problem there is likely the version of Ubuntu you chose.

You have a new computer. You chose to use, a good, but very outdated Linux.

Try one of the newer versions of a distribution, such as a current Ubuntu, MINT, SUSE, Arch, or other. You can try these as live distributions or boot as a virtual machine too.

And suicidaleggroll is correct, your question about hardware is just wrong. The computer contains the hardware and the operating systems make use of that hardware. The older version of Linux had trouble not using hardware.

This probably could've been avoided if you had asked more clearly way back at the start.

My first thought on your original question was why ask that particular question?

I suspect it's because you tried something and concluded that you had grabbed a version of Linux which does not support WIFI, and thus an incorrect conclusion.

As a result you were seeking this list. When in reality you should've just asked what distributions people would recommend to use on your particular hardware.