[LBo] wireless choices

[Bert Van Kets]

Why should some hardware be recognised out of the box? There is nothing 
wrong with installing drivers yourself and doing the configuration. You 
will learn something in the process.
I have a Hercules wireless card with an RT2500 chipset that is not 
recognised by any distribution. Luckily there are open source drivers 
for it and I can compile them myself. That took just a little bit of 
reading the INSTALL file and some Googling.
Once the card was recognized by my system, NetworkManager and DHCP did 
the rest.
The only thing you need to remember is that if you compile a kernel 
module yourself, you need to do that every time you upgrade the kernel. 
Keep the manual on how to compile and install the module at hand (I 
print them out and keep them in a folder).

Bert

Gregg Nicholas wrote:
> <rant>
> Over the years I've tried a variety of distros.  I decided that it was 
> time to try a new distro and thought it might be fun to learn about the 
> first distro that could recognize and use my wireless card. . . After 
> trying over a dozen distros on 3 different types of wireless hardware, 
> I'm ready to give up.  Guess I'll go back to my most familiar distro, 
> and start digging for hacks and tweaks that might make one of my wifi 
> cards work.  Unfortunately, it is just this type of situation which 
> prevents me from recommending linux to anyone but a geek. 
> </rant>
>
> Since this group is about Questions and Answers, I'd like to put a 
> question to the group as a whole:
> What wireless hardware have you personally used that required very 
> little tweaking?
>
> ....Gregg
>