hey guys im a total noob at linux i have tried wireless on mandrake with no luck. (rt2500) what distro of linux is the best for wireless?

they are all the same. If you need help let us know what you have done, errors, card, distro and anything else you may think is useful

well im going to install the 10.1 powerpack tomorrow. ill get back here tomorrow with some questions im sure of it

ok i cant get the ndiswrapper source to install with mandrake 10.1. im getting error 2. i cant post the exact error because im running a dual boot, but wrapper wont install correctly, so i cant use the command ndiswrappe -i

have an update: i can get ndiswrapper to install, but it says my device is not detected, and it wont let me modprobe ndiswrapper. i get a fatal error

I have both a desktop wireless and mini pci wireless card that uses the rt2500 chip-set. I would suggest against using NDISwrapper. For more than a few reasons. I am using the rt2500 driver that is maintained by serialmonkey. IF you search this site for rt2500 and serialmonkey you will find that there are some how-tos for install as well as stories by many other people on this chip-based card. I have had 0 problems with the driver and it is rock solid for me. for more information on my installation of linux on a 64 bit system as well as the included description on how to install the wireless on this computer go to http://well.hopto.org/averatec.doc this is in rich text format so you don't be afraid of the *.doc extension.

Good luck

I'm using the same driver and utility from serialmonkey - it is fine unless you use WPA then it seems a bit flaky. If you need any help then feel free to give me a shout....

BTW
I had the rt2500 card running with both the native driver and ndiswrapper, both worked ok

i too am a noob in linux but i finally got the ndiswrapper working. i'm not sure what the steps you took to try to install ndiswrapper but these are what i did. it took me the whole day to figure it out.

first download the ndiswrapper
extract the contents
open up a shell
login in as root
go to the directory where you extracted ndiswrapper
(just to be in the safe side to start out fresh type out these commands)
make uninstall
make clean
make
make install
(download the windows xp drivers for your wlan nic card and copy the .sys and the .inf file to your linux system, browse to whatever the directory is and type out these commands)
ndiswrapper -i "THENAMEOFTHEINFFILE.inf" (example for mine i type out 'ndiswrapper -i bcm5la.inf'
ndiswrapper -l (check if it detected the card)
modprobe ndiswrapper (the error you got when you did these earlier i kept having the same problem and found out that after i ran the 'make install' it went away)
iwlist wlan0 scan (i was stuck here for most of the day since i kept getting an error and found out the cause was because i was using a 32bit driver and i was running a 64bit linux)
iwconfig wlan0 essid "NAME OF YOUR SSID"
iwconfig wlan0 key restricted "WEP KEY"
dhcpcd wlan0

that should be it. hope it helps you.