PhotonWrangler said:
This is disappointing and a little surprising. I've always thought that the linux community was at the cutting edge of WiFi developments. I've never tried to run a wireless card on a linux-based laptop, and it looks like I won't be attempting this for awhile.
AFAIK, wireless card driver development has largely slowed down with the introduction of
ndiswrapper, which lets you use Windows drivers for your WiFi cards, and sometimes other drivers as well. I was not too happy about native drivers not being developed as much to be integrated in the Linux kernel, as it would make LiveCDs less useful, but apparently ndiswrapper is very good. I have not tried it, because I quit using Linux on my laptop before ndiswrapper gained visibility and stability (got a Powerbook; pretty happy with it). Now Linux is reserved for my desktop which is wired and I use it as an application server and file storage.
Alright, more information: I just asked some other people... and they say chipsets that do work natively are Intel Pro Wireless 2200 (Centrino laptops), Atheros, Prism54, and ZD1211, as well as a few others. Broadcom support is under heavy development. So... since my last experience with Linux and 802.11g, the driver situation has improved quite a bit... but for many other chipsets, it's ndiswrapper and prayer. Sorry for the misinformation.
The very best LiveCDs for autodetection would have to be Knoppix, Slax, and Mepis. Mepis was the only one of the three to recognize and run my laptop's sound card, yet none of them were able to detect the 1280x768 resolution of the LCD, forcing the LCD to go into 'stretched mode.' Knoppix has run perfectly with the exception of sound cards on every machine I've tried, as well as Slax. The Ubuntu "Hoary Hedgehog" LiveCD apparently has problems recognizing USB keyboards, and the PPC version could not recognize my Powerbook's trackpad (wtf?).
Personally, as far as LiveCDs go, I use
Damn Small Linux because it is very small (only 50MB), the first Linux I enjoyed using (disclaimer: YMMV; I liked it because of its limited user-friendliness, requiring me to learn my way through Linux... but it has enough GUI that my mom was able to use it just fine...) and because it requires so little processing power, it is almost guaranteed to work on any computer -- as long as it can boot from CDs.