Hi,

I'm not a complete newbie to linux, I've used Slackware a while back in college for a little while and I'm starting to use Ubuntu at work. I currently have a Mac Mini and a Dell laptop. I don't really like the direction Apple is going with the Mac OS and I would like to delve into Linux completely. I thought about running a virtualization of Slackware on the Mac, but felt I wouldn't use it enough if it was just sitting on the side. On the laptop, I'm thinking of installing Ubuntu. My questions are these:

1. How well will Slackware work with the wireless card on my Mac? Will there be much work required to set it up?

2. I have an HP Deskjet printer...will there be much conflict setting this up?

I will mostly be using Slackware for office apps like OpenOffice, learning the command line, some java development, and surfing the internet.

HP printers work pretty well out of the box with the hplip drivers. Have you searched for linux support for your wifi card? I've been using Slackware exclusively for about 5 years or so now. Works great.

Hello.

1. I dont have any experiences with Mac.

2. You can check if your printer is supported by CUPS. I think, it is,
but I am not sure.

btw, Slackware is the best linux distro that you can have.
It is for people who wants to really learn LINUX. It is hard
to say "yes" for your gived questions, but you can TRY and
you will see. OpenOffice is not problem like any other office
packages (Abiword, Gnumeric)

If you are not complete newbie, want to learn CLI commands,
want to learn new eperiences, Slackware is for you.

The HP printer is a Deskjet D2430. The wireless card is an Airport Extreme, with firmware Broadcom BCM43xx 1.0 (5.10.91.19). I haven't searched for support, but I will. Thanks.

Where's a good place to look for wireless card/print compatibility?

The LQ hardware compatibility list is a good place to start, and the open printing site.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/

http://www.linuxfoundation.org/colla...s/openprinting

For almost all wireless cards, you can check www.linuxwireless.org more probably in here http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Devices/PCI

Should these drivers work with the BCM43xx card I have?

http://slackbuilds.org/repository/13.../b43-firmware/

Well, both Airport Extreme cards are supported by the kernel b43 drivers, so I think you're ok.

I didn't like the linux b43 drivers for my lap top... I used ndiswrapper with windows drivers and got much more stability out of the card.... but that was back with slackware 12.2... maybe the newer kernels are better.

There is also a new open source broadcom driver, but you have to know the exact chipset, because it doesn't work with all of them:
http://lwn.net/Articles/404248/

About your printer: http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web...00_series.html

Up with kernel 2.6.32 my BCM4312 worked quite well with the b43 kernel driver, which did not happen with the broadcom-sta hybrid driver; every kernel update was a PITA, as the driver would build or not. Now I have a BCM4727 (Dell's choice, what can I do? :-P) with the brcm80211 driver that H_TeXMeX_H mentioned, and everything is working as it should, even though it's a staging driver.