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Our Blogs The BeerFiles Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, SimplyMEPIS - 3 distros, 9 wireless stories
Our Blogs The BeerFiles Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, SimplyMEPIS - 3 distros, 9 wireless stories | Ubuntu, PCLinuxOS, SimplyMEPIS - 3 distros, 9 wireless stories |
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| by Stan Beer | |
| Thursday, 15 November 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 3 If we had just tested PC 2, my Dell notebook, and nothing else, it would have been easy to surmise that Ubuntu is the best distribution for plug and play wireless. As soon as the Ubuntu live CD loaded and brought up the desktop, there was a little icon sitting in the toolbar at the top right corner of the screen which showed that the Belkin router had been recognised. All I basically needed to do was click on the icon, enter the WEP key and I was online and surfing the net. Featured Whitepaper
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With the PCLOS live CD, though, the experience was no less plug and play - although not quite as elegant. Prior to loading the PCLOS desktop, I was presented with a series of questions to configure the computer, some of which concerned setting up the wireless connection. It was clear from the questions, that the system recognized my wireless card and router and all the defaults were correctly set without me having to change anything. All that was required of me was to enter the WEP key, up came the brilliant PCLOS desktop and I was wirelessly online just as quickly and easily as with Ubuntu. The story for MEPIS was, unfortunately, somewhat different. Upon loading the MEPIS desktop screen, unlike the case with Ubuntu and PCLOS, there was no visible evidence that my wireless network had been detected - and it hadn't been. So I did what the respective guardians of all distros would like prospective users to do - I consulted the MEPIS Wiki and checked on the MEPIS forum. The page on the Wiki called "Adjust the wireless connection" contains what seem to be straight forward instructions for getting your network card recognized. However, after following them using the MEPIS KMenu network assistant as instructed, still no connection. I then consulted the forum to see if others had experienced and solved issues with wireless configuration and I saw a post by someone who had fixed the issue. The post, however, involved going into command line files to edit instructions. At that point I realized that this version of SimplyMEPIS (6.5), unlike Ubuntu and PCLOS, was simply not going to work out of the box with this machine. I then tested the distros on PC 3, which is by far the oldest of the three computers and also has a far from new Belkin wireless card. Both Ubuntu and MEPIS loaded but neither detected any wireless hardware or the network and, as far as I could tell, could not be connected wirelessly without resorting to geekish behaviour. The case with PCLOS was different because the system recognized the Belkin card during the pre-loading question session. Unfortunately, however, PCLOS also recognized that it did not have a driver for this particular router. The system therefore advised users to employ NDISwrapper, which allows Windows wireless network card drivers to run in Linux, and choose the appropriate Windows driver. The problem was that there was no obvious way to find the appropriate driver and load it that I could see. If I had been able to, however, I have a feeling that PCLOS may have been the only distro to provide plug and play wireless for this box because after all it did recognize the card. I intend to look further into using NDISwrapper with this box at a later date. The story with PC 4, however, was perhaps the most interesting of all. continued >> |
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