WiFI on Linux
 

Friends,

I am using Ubuntu Breezy Linux. I am planning to buy a laptop and would like to ask the best distro that supports wireless lans. Or if its possible using Ubuntu, what packages should I install to make it work? Wherein I can choose from available wireless network connections. Hope someone out there can help me on this. Thanks.

As to whether the install is easy or not completely depends on the make of wireless card(and the chipset it contains) you buy.

Different chipsets are covered by diffent drivers and some aren't supported natively at all, but need ndiswrapper which allows linux to use the supplied windows drivers.

Check out the HCL section of this forum to see other users experinces with different cards.

My advice is to get a laptop with an intel chipset featuring an ipw2200 wireless card - they supply their own drivers.

I'm very impressed with the Ralink in my laptop. Here is some good info.

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_....802.11ag.html

How about the distro? Okay, what If I already have the driver for the wireless network card, how can I use wlan in Ubuntu? Do you mean to say that if I install the driver, the wlan0 will automatically be activated in the networks. How can I choose which network I'm going to connect?

Not sure about Ubuntu. I've used it but not with wireless. Some distros can be a royal pain to get wireless up and running. Some come with wireless support built-in and some have nil or none.

The easiest distros I have found so far are PCLinuxOS, Mepis, and Stx. All I needed to do in these was create a wireless connection with their respective config tools.

you might want to try kanotix

http://kanotix.com/index.php?&newlang=eng

I do believe that Belkin has out of the box support with Linux, so why not just buy a seperate usb adapter and skip the built in. Getting wireless card to work is a hastle inside laptops!

I'm going to offer a contrarian viewpoint.......

There is no "best" distro when it comes to wireless support. Currently wireless is pretty poorly supported in all Linux distros, and while this is changing due to some new stuff migrating to the kernel, it still has a long way to go. It is probably more important to pick your distro on factors other than wireless, because it is highly likely that you will end up compiling your drivers from source no matter what distro you choose.

Thats not my experience with a Wireless USB adapter.
PCLinuxOS was the easiest to get it working with of about 5 I tried. This distro used the Win drivers direct from the CD and ndiswrapper did its stuff without any input from me. No command line stuff here!
And so it worked. I had tried manually using ndiswrapper on the other distros but never got the thing to work properly.

Re the quote above
I believe that support is available for some chipsets.

Many people have recommended taking a copy of knoppix, or any other distro that runs from CD, to "try out" on the shop's laptop. If it loads & runs, and finds the hardware, you should be OK. If not, try another model.

HTH

Belkin (like most manufacturers) use a variety of chipsets in their products. Some will have linux drivers, some won't.