Linux Distros And Wifi Use In Labtops

[livinthailandos]

I have a question out there and would like an answer on this as I can't find an answer to this question. I have a Sony Vaio Labtop and for wifi use I have to turn on a switch located on the left side of the computer. I have used Ubuntu 8.04 & 8.10, To no luck avail upon reading my forums, and a website that showed me how to get wifi working madberry.org I still never got it working. mind you I have the atheros 242 card installed. I then went and tried OpenSuse 11.0 where I had the option of 1 click install again further research and looking for answers wifi still did not work. So I put mandriva one spring 2008 and 100% Success with wifi working with no installing anything. So my question is, if mandriva can do something so simple as getting wifi to work without any install or compiling tar.gz files why can't other distros do the same thing. I know some people who simple got it working with other labtops like HP, Dell, Compaz, Acer, etc, so is because my labtop is sony or what. Look forward to all your answers

[Crushdepth]

It might be that your laptop wireless needs to have a particular driver installed to support your particular wireless chipset. I have an Atheros based card and it definitely doesn't work with Ubuntu out of the box, but I haven't got around to finding the right driver for it.

[dave_boo]

If you don't know the difference in philosphy between Linux and Microsoft, allow me a quick primer. Firstly, Microsoft believes that to increase their marketshare, and thus their profits, they need to make sure that their OS is the most dominant available. They've thus decided to close their source so that their competitors can not read it and create inter-operable systems. Add in that they ignore standards or make sure that their 'standard' is sufficiently different from what is accepted as to break other's interopability.

Now GNU/Linux has decided to go the complete opposite way. Instead of attempting to make sure they are the only OS, they have decided to actually follow standards.

How does this affect your question? Well, there are some companies in bed with Microsoft. I can't blame them too much since that makes sure there is bread on theirs and their shareholder's tables. However, since they are so tightly entangled with Microsoft, it screws other companies. If they were to merely release specs, the F/OSS community would do the heavy lifting for them assuming that it was a product in popular(or the use of an extremely talented programmer) demand.

Add in the fact that F/OSS purist usually look down on using binary blobs or closed source drivers/programs (I'm a bit torn on that; on the one hand if the manufacturers start releasing those 'bad' drivers/programs and there's enough demand for them perhaps in the future they'll really go open source) and thus insist on distros that don't have the drivers for certain companie's products. Other distros are not as 'pure' and thus have non-open source stuff inside them. Which is better? Your call.

Most distros have ndiswrapper in their repositories, and than all you have to do is find the Windows driver.

I haven't ever had problems installing a *.tgz, and with the archive managers they have in GUI now, it's really easy; no harder than installing a driver in Windows.

[slackula]

I have a question out there and would like an answer on this as I can't find an answer to this question. I have a Sony Vaio Labtop and for wifi use I have to turn on a switch located on the left side of the computer. I have used Ubuntu 8.04 & 8.10, To no luck avail upon reading my forums, and a website that showed me how to get wifi working madberry.org I still never got it working. mind you I have the atheros 242 card installed. I then went and tried OpenSuse 11.0 where I had the option of 1 click install again further research and looking for answers wifi still did not work. So I put mandriva one spring 2008 and 100% Success with wifi working with no installing anything. So my question is, if mandriva can do something so simple as getting wifi to work without any install or compiling tar.gz files why can't other distros do the same thing. I know some people who simple got it working with other labtops like HP, Dell, Compaz, Acer, etc, so is because my labtop is sony or what. Look forward to all your answers

I would guess that the WiFi card worked under Mandriva because it ships with a heavily modified kernel and they have included support and drivers for that particular card.

Please understand that all Linux distros are targeted at different users requirements. Some want it all to work 'out of the box' (SuSe, Ubuntu, Mandriva Fedora etc), some like to take control of the system and build it for their specific needs (Gentoo, Slackware, LFS, and more).

If I want to make a server and there is no need for me to have wireless card support in that box then why would I want the extra bits and pieces in my operating system? It is just overhead and extra stuff that needs to be patched and maintained.

The point of Linux distros is to give you the freedom you want to do the things you need.

*Example:*

Do you need NTFS support?

1) get a "do all" distro that has it and don't worry

2) get an easily modifiable distro and add it, while learning cool stuff

3) get something else and add it in at the time of installation

4) get something that is not quite so easy, but take the time to learn how to add it

The other important thing to do is to research the components in your machine before deciding that you want to switch to using a GNU/Linux based operating system, there are things out there that are hard to get working; but if you have the time and curiosity to spend it is a rewarding trip.

[slackula]

Oops, dave_boo replied while I was typing all that, read his answer, it's better. (as usual)

[Crushdepth]

I just installed Ubuntu 8.1 today and - after a couple of years of waiting - they have finally fixed the WIFI. You can use WPA out of the box now.