Hi Jim

For the lab, I have not worried deeply about whether the wireless worked or not. I was interested in how well the wireless card was detected by Knoppix though, and that was what I reported. But it was an aside, since the lab will run off cat5.

There is clearly wide variability in how well wireless works by distro.

I am going to now make a totally unsupported by science observation: It seems to me how well wireless works is directly related to the attitude the Distro has towards staying completely source code, or if they will include binaries for which they have no source.

Most people seem to think about this in terms of graphics cards: Whether or not the ATI or NVidia current drivers are automatically installable, or if they only source the open source version of the drivers, which tend to lag the current card sets a bit.

I think the same thing is true about wireless though: if you look at Broadcom support for example, some distros make you obtain an MS Windows driver for the computer you own, and then run a tool called fwcutter to snarf out firmware that the driver has to load to the wireless card when the card is being initialized. Variable firmware in the card is nice from the point of view wireless manufacturer, since it allows them to add new features over time, or patch errors in standards compliance. I expect to see a raft of this with the new 'N' cards, as that spec firms up and interoperability of the 'N' standard starts being tested in the real world.

I have had the most luck with Distros like Mint 2.2 as far as supporting wireless cards without needing any work on my part. I have a friend how has never been able to get Mint 2.2 to work on his eMachines 5312's Broadcom card though. He and I plan to have a look at that soon.

That being said, I have read online that Ubuntu based distos (of which Mint is one) are not good at adapting to flash media at this time. I recall the issue as being the device name of the flash card not being something Ubuntu was ready to accept ... or something along those lines. Don't hold me to that.

I made exactly one attempt to get that going about three months ago, and ended up having to re-format my fob to get it back from the dead. I am not sure if I had a media failure on the fob, or a loose nut at the keyboard.

When I do get it figured out though, I will post about it here.