Hi

Which is the best distro for wireless networking?

Thanks

Mike

michaelcollinswimbledon@MikeysTown.zzn.com wrote:
>
> Which is the best distro for wireless networking?

Define 'best' and qualify 'wireless networking'.

--
Ben M.

michaelcollinswimbledon@MikeysTown.zzn.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> Which is the best distro for wireless networking?
>

Gentoo.....

m.s.w

michaelcollinswimbledon@MikeysTown.zzn.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> Which is the best distro for wireless networking?

They're all equally horrible, unless you by sheer accident have a laptop
(presuming this is for a laptop) with a supported WiFi chipset.
If you don't, you have to use a PC-card, and buy a network card that
hopefully is supported. Since no card manufacturer lists the chipset
outside the box, and sometimes change it without warning, this can be a
gamble too.

Gentoo has the advantage of always having relatively new kernel drivers
or 3rd party drivers available, which is a plus. On the other hand, it
can be a bitch to set up if wireless is your /only/ option, as you most
likely won't be able to use wireless during the install process unless,
by the above mentioned small miracle, the chipset is supported by the
livecd.

It /may/ be easier to initially set up with a kitchen-sink distribution
like SuSE, Fedora, Mandriva or Debian (and Debian-based distros), which
come with multiple DVDs and not just a single CD for binary images like
Gentoo. However, with the larger distros you're often stuck with
whatever version is there at the time you set it up -- you get security
fixes and major bug fixes, but no new versions of software, unless you
update the *whole* system. Rolling your own from source is a major
hassle, due to software dependencies. With Gentoo, that's no problem --
if there's a better driver or WiFi tools, chances are they're available
with Gentoo; if not immediately, then within a couple of weeks.

I'm using Gentoo with a $20 Zyxel b/g/a card (Aetheron chipset), using
madwifi drivers and wpasupplicant. It works mostly well -- it freezes
the machine when I try to shut down the network connection, which is a
PITA. (Suggestions on how to solve this would be gratefully accepted.)
The Zyxel card was added because there was no way in heck to get the
built-in Broadcomm chipset to play -- using ndiswrappers with Windows
drivers was the only way, which I was unable to get to work on my
Athlon-based laptop (judging by Google results, few people manage to get
Broadcomm based WiFi to work under Linux).

Regards,
--
*Art

They are all equally bad, as linux wireless support generally sucks. I
have a dell laptop with an internal broadcom card that I got working
with the program ndiswrapper, although if you want to use tools like
kismet and put the card into monitor mode, you need one with a supported
chipset, which basically comes down to a prism chipset or atheros chipset.

David

michaelcollinswimbledon@MikeysTown.zzn.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> Which is the best distro for wireless networking?
>
> Thanks
>
> Mike
>

Arthur Hagen wrote:
> michaelcollinswimbledon@MikeysTown.zzn.com wrote:
>
>>Hi
>>
>>Which is the best distro for wireless networking?
>
>
> They're all equally horrible, unless you by sheer accident have a laptop
> (presuming this is for a laptop) with a supported WiFi chipset.
> If you don't, you have to use a PC-card, and buy a network card that
> hopefully is supported. Since no card manufacturer lists the chipset
> outside the box, and sometimes change it without warning, this can be a
> gamble too.

Not quite true. Gento ohas excellent support for RALINK RT2x00.
I have in front of me two PCs, each with one wire ehternet and 5
Canyon's Wifi 811.b/g cards, bassed on RT25xx and all is working
beautifully. Only itch is that i can9t put thew card in "master" mode
(so can't use it as a classical A.P. at the moment) and have to work in
"Ad-hoc", but this will be fixed with new generation of drivers.

Ad-Hoc works on 54Mbit/s,too.

Regards,


Branko

On Tue, 11 Oct 2005 03:31:13 +0000, David wrote:

> They are all equally bad, as linux wireless support generally sucks. I
> have a dell laptop with an internal broadcom card that I got working
> with the program ndiswrapper, although if you want to use tools like
> kismet and put the card into monitor mode, you need one with a supported
> chipset, which basically comes down to a prism chipset or atheros chipset.
>

In my experience I have been running wifi under Linux for over 4 years
now. I have in that time had Prism, Actmel, RTL and atheros chipset
adaptors. The prism stuff ran happily using hostap drivers as an access
point on an old P2-300 machine. The hardest to get going was the RTL8180
which works well but needs the Ndiswrapper or linuxant wrappers. The
Atheros is working on my new laptop using the madwifi drivers. I can't
remember what drivers worked the Actmel chipset but it was out of the box
on a Mandrake machine. So IMHO experience I can't say any of them suck.

michaelcollinswimbledon@MikeysTown.zzn.com wrote:
> Hi
>
> Which is the best distro for wireless networking?
>
> Thanks
>
> Mike
>

Distro doesn't matter, wi-fi chipset does. If you get one with Atheros
or Cisco chipsets (like most non-centrino Thinkpads had), it works
pretty much out of the box. If not, make sure you get one that has
drivers supported by linux and build the drivers yourself. There are
major differences within driver versions, which is wy building them your
self (or using a source-based distro like Gentoo) has advantages.

Arthur Hagen <art@broomstick.com> wrote:
>
> I'm using Gentoo with a $20 Zyxel b/g/a card (Aetheron chipset), using
> madwifi drivers and wpasupplicant. It works mostly well -- it freezes
> the machine when I try to shut down the network connection, which is a
> PITA. (Suggestions on how to solve this would be gratefully
> accepted.)

To follow up on this, I added the following to /etc/conf.d/net as a
workaround, and now the system shuts down properly:

predown() {
if [ "${IFACE}" = "ath0" ]; then
wpa_cli terminate
fi
return 0
}

Regards,
--
*Art