best distro for wireless pci cards?

thermg · 15 Mar 2006 at 15:22

Hi,

Does anyone know which distro has the best hardware support in terms of drivers for wireless network cards? I have a linksys PCI card so am looking for as little hassle with drivers as possible. Tried Fedora Core 4 which was a nightmare. Any other suggestions welcome.

Cheers

Cuchulain · 15 Mar 2006 at 15:26

thermg said:
Hi,

Does anyone know which distro has the best hardware support in terms of drivers for wireless network cards? I have a linksys PCI card so am looking for as little hassle with drivers as possible. Tried Fedora Core 4 which was a nightmare. Any other suggestions welcome.

Cheers

The latest versions of Ubuntu and Suse are supposed to have better wireless support, even if they don't, it's a breeze setting up ndiswrapper.

thermg · 15 Mar 2006 at 15:28

Cuchulain said:
The latest versions of Ubuntu and Suse are supposed to have better wireless support, even if they don't, it's a breeze setting up ndiswrapper.

Thats what i was trying to use with fedora but it was a nightmare. I ended going round in circles. Thanks though, i'll give them a look.

riddlermarc · 15 Mar 2006 at 21:23

I can verify that Ubuntu has decent wifi support - I'm a lifelong Fedora/RedHat user and had it on my laptop but it refused to acknowledge the built-in wifi card despite many hours of messing.. installed Ubuntu instead and straight away the wireless was auto-setup and working

Mikesoft · 18 Mar 2006 at 08:17

I found that ubuntu could not detect my wifi card. However SimplyMepis could.

FirebarUK · 18 Mar 2006 at 09:46

Another vote for SimplyMepis. Upon install it automatically wapped on the windows drivers and shoved them into ndiswrapper.

900I · 20 Mar 2006 at 20:55

SuSE 10.0 does wireless out of the box on most recognised wireless chipsets.

lovedaddy · 21 Mar 2006 at 16:52

Well

The distro shouldn't make much of a difference, so long as your able to add kernel modules yourself.

If its a linksys card, you might be fortunate and find its got a RT2500 chipset on it (the v4 WMP54s did) - that has a kernel module meaning no messy ndiswrapper.
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/

The other main kernel module is for the Atheros chipset and is found over here... http://madwifi.org/

If you do an lspci, you should be able to see what chipset the card has. Hopefully is either rt2x00 or Atheros (and not some grott like Broadcom...)

Best of luck

GhostyUK · 31 Mar 2006 at 19:41

thermg said:
Hi,

Does anyone know which distro has the best hardware support in terms of drivers for wireless network cards? I have a linksys PCI card so am looking for as little hassle with drivers as possible. Tried Fedora Core 4 which was a nightmare. Any other suggestions welcome.

Cheers

i recommend getting a new network card, i brought a linksys card thinking it would run on linux with it being made my cisco but it did not atheros chipset cards run ok,I brought 3 cards before getting one that worked, i had the wg511 v3 but that did not work for me, its becuse you have to watch the version number too.

this is the card i have got in desktop pc - netgear wg311T (PCI)
laptop - has the wg511T (PCM)

both of them have the atheros chipset and work with the madwifi drivers OC's sells them both.

hope this helps