Wireless Broadband and mandrivaLE
 

I have wireless broadband and having a little trouble with getting it to work on MandrivaLE.

I go to the network and internet icon when I configure my computer and I go through the options until I get to the drivers, it asks me if I wish to manually install on or use a windows one. Whichever one I choose I still get back to the same screen, something pops up in a separate window but it's gone so quickly that I can't read it.

Any suggestions?

Mat

The windows driver app one does not yet work with Mandrake any version.

If it hasn't found your card it does not have the driver so if you want wireless get a card that works with Mandrake or change your distro,

There are far more drivers installed on Suse and Mandrake doesn't seem to be getting very far with wireless drivers I guess it's low on their priorities.

Type iwconfig in a terminal to ensure it hasn't found your card/usb.

A tip if you want wireless to work with mandrake -without waiting for mandrake to come up with wireless drivers- get an access point connect it to your ethernet port and switch it via a browser to slave mode. Most access points have this facilty, check before buying though.



:Pengy: :Pengy: :Pengy:

If your card isn't recognized, you can use a Windows driver by using Linuxant Driver Loader (linuxant.com), for $20, or the free, open source alternative ndiswrapper (ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net). If you choose ndiswrapper, make sure you download the source from their sourceforge site and install it that way, the rpm version that comes with Mandrake is no good (at least it wasn't in 10.1, which is what I run). I used version 0.9 simply because that's the version that was *supposed to come with my distro. Either of those should get you up and running no problem without buying new hardware or anything. And if your card uses a broadcom chipset, there is no distro on the planet (regardless of any user propoganda) that will work with it out of the box, as broadcom won't release their hardware specs to open source developers, so native linux drivers can't be written yet.

Thanks for your help. I do have a broadcom chipset, so I will have a play with it.

Mat