I have almost gotten through installing my wireless equipment in Mandrake, but something went wrong. I know I have the correct Windows driver, because there are apparently several versions of my equipment (Linksys USB wireless adapter, WUSB54G) and Linksys provides driver downloads for all of them, so I quit trying to guess the correct one, and simply plucked the drivers off the installation CD. "Modprobe ndiswrapper" worked without an error, but the system log says there is a problem. Dmesg produced:


eth0: no IPv6 routers present
cdrom: hdc: mmc-3 profile capable, current profile: 8h
cdrom: hdc: mmc-3 profile capable, current profile: 8h
ISO 9660 Extensions: Microsoft Joliet Level 3
ISOFS: changing to secondary root
ndiswrapper version 0.8 loaded
ndiswrapper: loadndiswrapper failed (256)
VFS: busy inodes on changed media.
VFS: Can't find ext2 filesystem on dev fd0.
usb 1-1: USB disconnect, address 2
usb 1-1: new full speed USB device using address 3
_____________________
Does anyone know what error #256 would be?

If it's significant, my system is: Celeron; 598 MHz; 256 MB RAM; 10 GB HD.

Sometimes the drivers on the cd do not work. I have seen several posts where it says to get the drivers elsewhere. I don't know if that is your case or not.

I read that you need to have the kernel version 2.6 and it doesn't work with 2.4. Also, I read that there is 4 versions of that NIC so you probably need to find out which version you are running because I think they changed chipsets somewhere along the way.

Here is a link that should help you. http://perpetualmadness.com/misc/ndiswrapper.html
If you follow it step by step it should get you up and running.

I'd recommend checking out the ndiswrapper project site as well. They have a wiki which keeps the working cards up to date. Many times, to get some wireless cards working, they find that they can't use the drivers that come with the card and will sometimes instead use a driver for a different card with the same chipset or a driver for the chipset itself. Maybe another driver will work better.

Also I noticed that it is loading up version 0.8. That's OLD. Newer versions have much better compatibility than older ones and there are currently Mandrake rpms versions up to 1.2.

Check that page:

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/m...index.php/List

Springshades, about the fact of 0.8 being loaded: I noticed that too, and found it peculiar, because the Ndiswrapper RPM that I downloaded was supposed to be 1.0.3 (or something close), not 0.8. In case Mandrake was somehow failing to overwrite the Ndiswrapper 0.8 with the newer RPM, I tried to delete 0.8 according to the instructions at charlescpc's link; but that made a mess of things, with Ndiswrapper becoming unable to run after that.

I'm not sure if you're trying to get this to work, but I found a 1.2 version of the rpm if you'd like it. Might have better support for you. You'll probably want to uninstall your old one first. Also, the new one might have dependencies, I'm not sure. Anyway, once you download it, you can use urpmi or rpmdrake to install it by adding the folder you put it in as a local rpm source. That's pretty easy to do in package management in the mandrake control center. Here's the link:

http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat....i586.rpm.html

Sounds like you might be done with Mandie though. If you don't like the philosophy of Ubuntu and don't want to go back to Xandros (I actually liked Xandros though, kind of had a nice professional feel to it), can I throw in my suggestion for Mepis. It sets up many things automatically that you'd have to do manually otherwise. Most of the plugins for firefox are already set up. Flash works out of the box. Synaptic is a good package manager.

Plus, it seems like Mepis might be aimed at Laptop users to some extent. So their support for wireless should be good.

Ehh...I did mock Ubuntu, yes, but I may well use it anyway. I would also try MEPIS, but it's a CD version and, besides being slow, would leave me without an available CD drive--I have only one, of course.

Not true actually. MEPIS is set up so that you try it out as a Live CD. However, it is meant to be a hard drive installed distro. For those who decide they like it and it works on their hardware, you click one button on the desktop and it brings up the options to install it. Very simple installation process as well. Anyway, it's worth a shot and many people love it (I think it's currently the easiest distro to use).

The things that it comes with that are nice for an out of the box set up are: MP3 encoder support, flashwave player, Adobe Reader, OFFICIAL Nvidia Drivers (the nvidia kind, not the nv kind from the dri), latest patches from CVS for ACPI to work for laptops, a couple package repositories already set up so you don't have to add them all (like you have to do in Mandriva), it's truly Debian package based which means all or at least most of the official .deb packages should work (this is not true for Ubuntu, many of the official .deb packages won't work so they have to have their own repositories). Also, many things have short walk throughs the first time you open them which is REALLY nice the first time you open up Synaptic or something like that. They're very short, so they aren't annoying like the Windows tutorials, but it's information that Mandriva in particular just doesn't have in convenient places.

My one warning would be that be default Mepis uses one mouse click to do everything (as opposed to double clicking). Running programs, opening folders. You can change this, but I found that it really isn't that hard to get used to it. Just a warning that you may end up opening two of a lot of programs on your first day if you're like me. Also, I'll add another if you try things, Synaptic is the way you install things, first time you open it you'll get a lot of errors. That's because some of the sources have been removed. You can stop the errors by getting rid of all the "non-us" repositories.