On Fri, Jul 09, 2010 at 05:14:59AM -0000, iloveubuntulinux wrote:
> I'm running Ubuntu 8.10 on a Dell Inspiron 2650 laptop (Pentium 4 @ 1.6 GHz / 512 Mb) and trying to use a Netgear WG511 PCMCIA wifi card. No luck with getting the card to work.
>
The card doesn't work on Linux out of the box. Can be made to work with
ndiswrapper.
Putting netgear wg511 linux into google is how I discovered this. :)
(After the first results, I went to advanced, and chose to only get
results from the past year.)
> This is from another friend who 'doesn't like Linux' because he put it on the wrong machine...
>
> I suggested he try DSL (damn small Linux) but I don't know if it could work with his wifi card either. Any ideas?
>
As DSL has an older kernel, the chances of it working were even worse.
The best ones for questionable hardware are usually Mint and
Mandriva--Mint because, as Roy points out, it makes closed source
drivers available. There are others too--in this case, one would have
to use ndiswrapper, which makes use of a Windows driver.
This is part of the schizophrenia of opensource. One wants to use
opensource, but also wants a usable machine, and often, the two things
aren't compatible.
For those who use Linux for work, or as their main home computer, one
learns to check before buying a machine--though it becomes harder all
the time--one used to be able to google and find out which wireless and
so on was included. Now, they only list it as wireless and tell you if
it's b, g, n, or all of them. To make it more of a pain, they often
switch chipsets---so someone might ask me, if I get an Asus1000HE will
it work, I say yes, because mine has an Atheros card, supported in most
distributions, though not CentOS, for example, because it has an older
kernel.
Then, they buy it and it turns out to be a Realink card, which can be
made to work, but requires more effort.
One can argue, It's the vendor's fault, they should supply opensource
drivers, but regardless, the reality is that if you want to use Linux,
there's lots of hardware that either won't work at present, or will
require more effort than most people want to make.
--
Scott Robbins
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