[H-GEN] OS suggestions wanted for WiFi on a laptop

[Greg Black]

I have a laptop that runs FreeBSD-4.3 (and Windows-ME) quite
successfully.  It does not run later versions of FreeBSD (i.e.,
4.4, 4.5, 4.6, 4.7 or 5.0) without special magic at boot time
and, once booted in those releases, refuses to talk to my
wireless NIC.  OpenBSD-3.2 and 3.3 install and run, but won't
talk to the NIC either (albeit with entirely different symptoms
from the same driver).

My next choices would seem to be NetBSD and/or a Linux variant,
of which I'd most likely prefer to try Debian.  I'm not in any
way interested in religious preferences -- I just want to use a
free[1] OS that is up-to-date and can be maintained with
security fixes and so on.  It's fine under FreeBSD-4.3, but that
release is now getting long in the tooth and is not covered by
newer bug fixes[2].

I'm keen to hear from people who have experience with either or
both of the NetBSD and Linux options.  In particular, I want to
know about experiences with running Lucent/Cabletron WiFi PCMCIA
cards on crappy laptops.  My preference is for a BSD, since all
my other systems are BSD and it's what I know, but I'm willing
to switch to Linux if it works and BSD doesn't.

I've wasted two full days on the latest experiments with OpenBSD
and would prefer to find a solution without wasting too much
more time.

Unless you think your ideas will be widely interesting, I'd
suggest private replies to me rather than to the list.  It would
be a shame to start a little flamefest over this.

Thanks in advance to anybody who has some helpful ideas.

Greg

[1] Free in all senses of the word.

[2] The FreeBSD people say, quite reasonably, that people who
    want security should run a recent release; unfortunately,
    4.4 broke PCMCIA support and nobody is willing to fix it.

-- 
Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> <http://www.gbch.net/gjb.html>
GPG signed mail preferred; further information in headers.
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