[Gllug] desktop distro with "will just work" 54g support

[Karanbir Singh]

Martin A. Brooks wrote:
> Hi
> 
> A friend of mine, who is in no way technically minded, has asked me to
> suggest a desktop linux distro that will "just work" with his notebook. 
> Most of the clicky distros will suit him, but I'm wondering which would
> make his built-in broadcom 54g wireless NIC work without any fiddling.

Two things are important here - what is the chipset on his/her laptop ?
ATIx300 - atix700 etc now have support in the mainline kernel ( but very
new kernels ). Most of the new intel chipsets also mostly work.

The Broadcomm bcm43xx driver is now also in the mainstream kernel - >
2.6.16, but it does still need a firmware drop ( fwcutter will extract
this firmware from the windows driver and drop in the right place, but
this step is manual, and I've not seen an installer automate this
process to the level of JustWorks.

Also the bcm43xx driver has worked stable only upto 22mb/sec ( even on a
802.11g network ). Some people in the Apple platform have reported a
stable 40+mb/sec link. I've not seen that myself, sustained over a
period of time.

> 
> Any suggestions for such a distro?

pretty much anything, which runs a 2.6.15+ kernel out of the box should
be workable (I'll say either Ubuntu or Fedora, since I've tried this (
bcm )with both of them, I am sure there are others out there that might
work as well ) - just that you need a very new kernel, install time.

none  will have the card working out-of-the-box, at the very least,
firmware movement foo will need doing manually.

hth

-- 
Karanbir Singh : http://www.karan.org/ : 2522219 at icq
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