[GLLUG] Wi Fi Support in Current Releases

[Matt Graham]

On Monday 06 October 2003 21:45, after a long battle with technology, 
Michael J McCarty wrote:
> I've been fighting the newbie fight with the added burden of
> connecting to our DSL via Wi Fi (802.11b).  I saw on the Mandrake
> site that release 9.1 supports wireless networking (out of the box
> maybe??). Is this becoming common for current releases with the rising
> popularity of wireless?

802.11b is pretty popular.  However, support for 802.11b hardware is 
mostly dependent on the kernel, not the specific version of whatever 
distro you're using.  More recent kernels (latest stable version is 
2.4.22) support more devices.  Mandrake 9.1 may have a friendly 
pointy-clicky configuration assistant, but it has the same 802.11b 
support (or lack thereof) as the next distro down the line, and it all 
ends up doing "modprobe $MODULE", ifconfig, iwconfig, and route in the 
end.

Anyway:  Are you still having a problem with your 802.11b card?  If so, 
provide details, like the make and model of the card, the version of 
the distro you're running, the output of "uname -a", and a detailed 
description of what you've tried already and any error messages you 
received.  http://catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html is snarky and 
abrasive, but it's a very good guide to asking technical questions.  
HTH,

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