Best wireless support

[Darksat]

Just wondering, which distros have the best support for inbuilt wireless cards?

[Roxoff]

Dunno. I use Fedora Core, and it installed the Broadcom chipset almost out of the box (I needed to take the chipset firmware out of the windows drivers to use it). I'm sure other distros have similar support.

[cmcrouse]

Roxoff I have the same wireless card, and I'm using core 5? How did you get it to work?

BTW I'm a massive noob with Linux. Only been using for about 1 month on a desktop and figured I would toss it on my laptop too.

[Roxoff]

Roxoff I have the same wireless card, and I'm using core 5? How did you get it to work?

BTW I'm a massive noob with Linux. Only been using for about 1 month on a desktop and figured I would toss it on my laptop too.

Here's what you do:

- Get the windows drivers
- Get the bcmwfw-cutter tool (it's in the yum repos)
- run the cutter tool on the windows drivers
- put the resulting firmware in /lib/firmware

It might be best to reboot at this point. Check your network config box (system-config-network) and you should have the driver available (if not, use kyum or yumex to search for anything to do with broadcom wireless) and set it up that way.

You can use NetworkManager (one of the best Linux tools ever created) or wpa_supplicant to handle any encryption. I use wpa_supplicant, 'cos NetworkManager tries to hijack my neighbours wireless lan rather than use my own.

[cmcrouse]

Thanks Roxoff. I will give that a spin when I get home.

[weknowtheworld]

Wireless is a bit sticky in Linux still. I don't think any distros (at least not any that I'm aware of) have terrific support for wireless devices "out of the box". I'm pretty happily using Gentoo with a Linksys wireless card and I'm working on getting it to recognize the Broadcom 1350 onboard wireless NIC on my Inspiron 9100 but it's been challenging.

I'd advise you to figure out how to get your card working in the distro you like. If it works in one, you can pretty likely get it working in another. But you'll need to google a lot and scour lots of online forums and mailing list archives.

Good luck!!!

[cmcrouse]

But you'll need to google a lot and scour lots of online forums and mailing list archives.
Good luck!!!

I learned very quickly that this method is the best method of getting info.

[Darksat]

I found a couple.
Backtrack and DSL linux both work fine out of the box for me on my laptop.