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

Michael Anthon michael at anthon.net
Wed Apr 16 07:03:43 EDT 2003


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> Debian should be fine, and apt would be a useful tool for keeping
> up-to-date.  I personally prefer Red Hat (although I'm starting to move
> away now, looking at Linux-from-scratch now) which can be updated using
> the official up2date (requires RHN subscription) or using autoupdate,
> which seems to work just nicely.

For anyone who hasn't played with it yet, Knoppix (3.2 is the latest
release) is great for testing out this sort of stuff.  It's based on Debian
and boots off a CD, no need to install anything and comes with a fairly
comprehensive set of drivers and a surprisingly good job at auto detection.
That said, I recently tried it out on my wife's laptop (IBM T30) and the
wireless stuff failed dismally.  The machine has both an internal Cisco
Aironet card and an external PCMCIA D-Link DWL-650+ (because the IT people
at work refuse to enable the internal device in the machine for security
reasons).  It didn't seem to have drivers for either of these devices as far
as I could work out... but then I've had little experience with WiFi under
Linux.  Anyway, I'm rambling, the point was... give knoppix a run and see if
it works, it may well "just work".

Cheers
Michael


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