[LBo] QnA Digest, Vol 12, Issue 19

[Gregg Nicholas]

The goal of my experiment was to find out how complicated wireless is 
with the current distros.  I've compiled the kernel and modules before 
and was able to get one of these cards to work a couple years ago.  That 
type of effort may be okay for a geek, but it prevents me from 
recommending linux to anyone with a laptop.  You may argue that Windows 
doesn't handle some wireless devices either - but the Windows driver 
comes with the device.  Our community still has a lot of work to make 
linux simple enough for normal users.
....Gregg

> Date: Mon, 20 Aug 2007 09:03:59 +0200
> From: Bert Van Kets <linuxbasics at vankets.com>
> Subject: Re: [LBo] wireless choices
> To: qna at linuxbasics.org
> Message-ID: <46C93CDF.3080500 at vankets.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
>
> 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
>