Re: General Questions from Newbie...

Eric "Shubes" wrote:

> Craig White wrote:
>
>> On Wed, 2005-03-02 at 02:35 -0700, Joshua Bryan wrote:
>>
>>> First I am really leaning twords using SuSE 9.2 for my distro...
>>> There are the pro's and Con's for it, but it comes as close to
>>> meeting my needs as possible I think... I am really looking for a
>>> distro that works really well with multimedia as that is like a
>>> staple for me. I know that SuSE does not support DVD playback from
>>> the box but it seems easier to add that then try and get my wireless
>>> card to work with Fedora Core 3. Anyway back to my first question
>>> has anyone here used SuSE 9.2 w/ wireless and had any major issue's
>>> besides the general fuss?
>>
>>
>> ----
>>
>> Wireless cards are another issue - many chip sets do not operate with
>> the code that is in GPL. Typically the orinoco and Prism chipsets will
>> work. Intel has made a lot of code available for their Centrino wireless
>> chipsets and recent kernels have made using the above wireless 'cards'
>> pretty much a plug and play operation. All non-GPL code supported
>> wireless chipsets require ugly hacks such as ndiswrapper and I wouldn't
>> recommend them.
>> ----
>>
> Ditto what Craig said. To elaborate a bit, my experience is that the
> problems encountered with wireless cards are more vendor related than
> distro related. IOW, a given card is likely to work (or not) just as
> well with any (newer) distro. Your success will be more dependent on
> the card (chipset, actually) than the distro. For example, if the card
> has a Broadcom chipset, your only choice to get it working would be to
> use ndiswrapper. Not a pretty picture.
>
> To get an inkling of what you're in for, you can try a (recent)
> live-cd distro such as knoppix or ubunto and see if it works with your
> card. You can also take that opportunity (running on linux) to find
> out what chipset your card actually has using the 'lspci' command.
> Alternatively, you can find the manufacturer of the chipset in windoze
> on the driver tab of the properties window for the device. Knowing who
> made the chipset on your card (the model number isn't enough) goes a
> long way toward knowing what kinds of problems you may encounter.
>
> IOW, the question is: what chipset does your wireless card contain?
>
> HTH

Right O... I have not bought the card yet so I can get whatever I need
and that is nice... Does anyone know how linux works with usb wireless
adaptors such as the linksys WUSB11 ? I have a linksys router and
therefore would like to stick with the same vendor for all the wireless
hardware. Thanks guys for all the incite... The other issue is hardware
makers such as linksys will use different chip sets in the exact same
card... How is one suppose to tell before hand what chip set it uses?

Thanks again,

~wd0mkr
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