wireless friendly distributions
 

With the announcement that San Francisco will provide city wide wireless internet, a working linux wireless program is becoming a necessity. About three months ago, I posted the question of whether any of the newer distributions are user friendly. I ask the same question again. Please do not respond with questions about my equipment. I have answered that question several times with no useful follow-up. I have found that when linux gets sometime right, e.g. printers or scanners, no specific information is needed. WindowsXP recognizes my wireless equipment and installs it without fuss. What I want to know is whether any linux distribution can do the same.

yea, well, it does depend on your chipset to a much larger extent than the distribution.

Apparently though wireless can be a little easier to set up in distros such as suse and mandriva, I think they come bundled with some wireless drivers and ndiswrapper.

Any distribution which can run ndiswrapper will be a distribution which can work. Wait, that's all of them! :)

Now, which distributions make it particularly easy? Check out SuSE, Linspire (admittedly, a dumbed-down distribution in some respects), Mandriva, and Kubuntu. SuSE will be the most point-and-click where wireless is concerned, for an out-of-the-box installation.

I shall try
 

I have tried the NDIS wrapper with pclinuxos and Ubuntu - they didn't work. One of them started the program and the other didn't. I downloaded the latest test version of Ubuntu and it fouled up my computer. It may have been a faulty download or a bug in the system. With effort, I restored my computer using the last stable version of Ubuntu.

I shall try the distributions recommended by KimVette.

If you go with SuSE, go with the OpenSuSE beta as SuSE 10.0's networking is a little buggy in some areas and requires a bit of tweaking to work (the KDE/Samba integration in particular)

This attitude is why you may never get it to work. It's ALL about your equipment.

Here's a pretty up-to-date list of what will and will not work. Plan ahead!

If you still think 'it should just work', forget Linux.

To rickh:
I have played around with linux for years. What makes the current situation different is that in almost every respect, newer versions of linux are equal to or better than WindowsXP. It is now mainstream. While I have Windows driver disks for my two printers, linux recognizes them and installs without trouble. Based on experience with other things, I do expect a simple installation. I will bet that the installation of wireless will as you put it "it should just work" this year for newer distributions. Linux programmers are just too just too good to leave one major exception.

Previous threads on the topic:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=384870
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=382409

Folks tried to help him, but he didn't return the requested info. Without error messages, logs, etc. and now his statement "no specific information is needed." that he's not going to get it working, so he may very well be stuck with windows since he has stated in this thread "Please do not respond with questions about my equipment."

Now Sheine, rather than being so uncooperative and stubborn, admit that:
- Windows does NOT work with all hardware out of the box
- Drivers HAD to be installed in order for Windows to recognise the WLAN chipset
- Relevant info IS required in order to help you

Until then, expect it to continue not working. :)

My question was not "Please help me to get my wireless to work", it was "which distributions are wireless friendly". I indicated that I would try the ones suggested.

Others on the internet have written that wireless is still difficult with linux, it is not just my experience.

Following a suggestion here, I tried Kubuntu and got the same result as with Ubuntu: wlan0:netcfg/internal-wlan doesn't exist. Other distributions found my internal-wlan but failed to install it.

If you want it to "just work" then just wait. The 2.6.17 kernel has a native driver merged that is set to replace ndiswrapper and then wireless support will be as good as any other OS. Other than that, please grow up. If you didn't want to waste time answering questions about your hardware (which I can understand) why not include that information in the original post, might be a step in the right direction...

The obvious question is when will distributions with the 2.6.17 kernel be available?

Well, in (I guess) all distributions kernel is upgradeable by hand. In most it will even not cause major trouble. In some it won't bring any trouble...
Anyway, an attempt to upgrade kernel nearly never ruins anything if done properly. "Properly" refers to adding correct local suffix and editing bootloader configuration.
So - your system, your rules...

According to various sources, I can find a driver for my equipment at ftp.linux-wlan.org. I can get to this site, but when I go to downloads ../pub/linux-wlan-ng, I can never make this connection. I have even tried to do it with IE. Has anyone been successful with this site?

Yep, I just looked and got the list of files in /pub/linux-wlan-ng. I didn't try to download anything.

I didn't know this. Thanks for the info! :)

Peace...

Your are a better man than I, Charley Brown (tomdkat). I tried again, based on your report, and failed. The last posting to that site was in 2002. I guess that I must wait for 2.6.17.

Let me add another vote for SUSE - version 10.0 specifically. I had no problems setting it up on several computers using WPA encryption. Of course, using no encryption or WEP encryption should be even easier. I understand Linspire can set up no or WEP encryption for wireless, which I am guessing would also be good enough for an "all public" wireless, although I have not tested it personally.

Some problems do get solved! I just tried pclinuxos 0.93 miniME and it recognized my wireless connection immediately. When the full version comes out, I shall convert my laptop into a linux computer.

Hey, I just thought of a solution to your problem!!!!! Why not try pclinuxos? Version 0.93 I think. See if that helps... ;)

Peace...

Not so fast. My wireless worked perfectly for one day and now I can't get it to work. If I find out how to make it work, I shall post the method here. I have tried the usual configuration tricks without success. I do not want to reinstall because I will lose downloads that took hours.

Solved. A responder on the pclinuxos forum solved the problem for now. He said that in dual boot computers, Windows sometimes steals the signal. The solution was to cut off all power for 15 to 20 minutes. It worked for me.

Wow, that's handy!

I have been playing around with this some more. I have discovered, using harddrake, that every time that I shut down encryption changes from "none" to "WPA pre-shared key". Upon restarting the computer, I have no wireless connection. Then when I change from "WPA .." back to "none", I have a wireless connection.

Assuming that this is the troule, how can I make this change permanent? I have looked in the rc.d folder but can't find a place.