Linux Distro for Laptop + Wireless?

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thejeremy

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I recently bought an Acer Aspire 5100 laptop and I want to put Linux on it. Here are the specs:

AMD Turion 64 bit 2 GHz CPU
1 GB RAM
ATI Radeon Xpress 1100
80 GB HD
Broadcom 802.11g Wireless Card (BCM4318 AirForce One 54g)

Not bad for $600?

Anyway, I've tried a few distrobutions already (Fedora Core, Kubuntu, Ubuntu) and haven't had much luck setting up the wireless card. FC wouldn't boot at all actually, not sure why...

Needless to say, I haven't really found a distro I'm happy with yet.

What's the best distro to put on a laptop in terms of interfacing a wireless card? Are there any that work out of the box better than others? Has anyone put Linux on their laptop and found a certain distro to work really well?

Any responses are welcome.
 
Actually I'm pretty sure his card works with the bcm43xx kernel module. So he most likely just need to modprobe bcm43xx.
 
Thanks for the replies so far.

Getting wireless working has been a pain in the a$$, and it's not even completely working yet. I installed SuSE 10.1 today and I found 9834579 tutorials for how to setup wireless on the Broadcom 4318 AirForce One 54g card using ndiswrapper (like I do for every distro I try). It seems like every new distro I try, I have a different issue. This time, I did what it said, and I'm able to scan the area for local access points using the command "iwconfig wlan0 scan." However, I can't get an IP address or connect to anything whatsoever. I feel like I'm being teased as the APs are there but just out of reach.

*shrug*

Putting Linux on a laptop seems pointless to me if I can't get the wireless working :(

On top of the wireless issues, SuSE didn't feel like recognizing my sound capabilities out of the box, which Ubuntu at least did, and 10.1 still has a few bugs to work out. My update manager gave me problems immediately. Bah.
 
thejeremy said:
Thanks for the replies so far.

Getting wireless working has been a pain in the a$$, and it's not even completely working yet. I installed SuSE 10.1 today and I found 9834579 tutorials for how to setup wireless on the Broadcom 4318 AirForce One 54g card using ndiswrapper (like I do for every distro I try). It seems like every new distro I try, I have a different issue. This time, I did what it said, and I'm able to scan the area for local access points using the command "iwconfig wlan0 scan." However, I can't get an IP address or connect to anything whatsoever. I feel like I'm being teased as the APs are there but just out of reach.

*shrug*

Putting Linux on a laptop seems pointless to me if I can't get the wireless working :(

On top of the wireless issues, SuSE didn't feel like recognizing my sound capabilities out of the box, which Ubuntu at least did, and 10.1 still has a few bugs to work out. My update manager gave me problems immediately. Bah.

Novell Zen updater is terrible, I suggest not using it, you can still update your system through software management or YaST>Software>Update software.

You'll need to add more installation source, pick one from Packman and Guru and also pick one for your video card (ATI repository's at the bottom)

http://en.opensuse.org/Additional_YaST_Package_Repositories
 
I found a few installation tutorials that helped me out in the updater area. YaST and Smart seem to be the way to go, they're workin out for me.

Also, I fixed my wireless :)

After installing ndiswrapper and the drivers, I was able to scan but not connect to any access points, like I said. After running ifup and ifstatus it said the interface was not configured or something, so I checked out the configuration file directory /etc/sysconfig/network. Apparently the config file was named ifcfg-wlan-wlan0, so I renamed it to ifcfg-wlan0 and everything started working perfectly. Just so everyone knows, I didn't see that in any ndiswrapper tutorials so if you're having wireless troubles I'd see if that's the problem.

Only thing that bugs me now is SuSE's horrrrible boot up time...

Thanks again everyone!
 
I would suggest disabling or (uninstall it is much better) Beagle and disabling AppArmor (YaST>Novell AppArmor>AppArmor Control Panel).

Certain network services that do start up by default on SUSE is Postfix and SSH, if you don't need neither one, it's better off to disable it (YaST>System>System Services (runlevel).
 
I can edit the startup services in K Menu -> System -> Service Configuration -> KSysV (SysV-Init Editor) right? Run level 5? I've never understood the different run levels...I know 5 or 6 runs when you boot the computer, run level 3 gets rid of the graphical interface, and 0 is shutdown, correct? Could someone point me to somewhere that explains these better?
 
You can do it from there if you want.

Runlevel are different for all distro but the common runlevel 6 is to restart and 0 is to shutdown.

1 is for single user no networking
2 is for single users with networking
3 is for multiple users with networking
4 is users define
5 is multiple users with networking and X Windows (that's what many people are on)

Usually I run my servers on runlevel 3 and my clients and workstations on the graphical runlevel 5, servers do nothing but serve the service they are configured to so I really don't need them to run at 5.

I guess this would help?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runlevel
 
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