[Gllug] mepis wireless + other issues

[Mike Brodbelt]

co at byintelligentdesign.co.uk wrote:
> Hi Rich and Mike,
> 
> I am confused. I googled and found the files I mentioned before. Are  
> you saying these are no good? Because I was more confused about what I  
> was supposed to do.

Not no good specifically, but you're likely to have trouble. The
ndiswrapper driver is basically a hack to allow Windows drivers to be
loaded within Linux, and it's mainly useful when a card has no Linux
driver. Even there, you're loading a large blob of non-native code into
your kernel, so it's to be avoided if possible.

You also refer to downloading ndiswrapper-1.34.tar.gz - if you're new to
Linux this is a fairly bad plan. Your distribution should provide
ndiswrapper, and you should install it using the version packaged for
the distro. Under Ubuntu, you'd simply do "apt-get install ndiswrapper"
from the command line. Installing from the tarball will require you to
build the software yourself, and will put stuff on your machine that
your packaging system doesn't know about. This will cause grief unless
done with care, and should be avoided unless really necessary.

With your wireless card specifically, there are numerous posts about it,
but I couldn't see anyone who claimed to have got it working properly -
just lots of references to hard freezes and intermittent functioning.
The best link I saw was here:-

http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=225206

So you probably can get it to work, but it's likely to be a pain. For a
relatively small price, you could buy a RaLink based one like the one I
mentioned, which won't require ndiswrapper, and will work more reliably.
Up to you, but these days I can't be bothered to spend the time fighting
with badly supported hardware. If you're moving from Windows though,
you're likely to have some of it.

> Also I have other hardware like an ATI Radeon X550. Will this be  
> compatible.

Yes.

> I have noticed some of the 3d screen savers don't work  
> very well. This could be due to the graphics card not being installed  
> properly.

You've probably got no hardware 3d. With Radeons you have two choices -
you can use the fglrx drivers, which are ATI provided binary only
drivers, or you can use the free drivers provided as part of X.org. The
X550 is based on the RV370 chipset, and the support is good enough that
I'd recommend avoiding fglrx, and sticking with the X.org drivers.

To make 3d work, you'll need kernel modules loaded for your AGP chipset
(will depend on your motherboard chipset's AGP interface), a DRM module
for your chipset (called radeon), and the appropriate X driver (also
called radeon, but not the same as the kernel module) loaded. The dri
wiki may help you with it, but you should be able to get a pretty decent
3d performance out of that card.

http://dri.freedesktop.org/wiki/

> How do I know what is really compatible with Linux. There was some  
> info about the speed booster but if this is bad info how can I tell?

It's not always easy, unfortunately. Some classes of devices, like hard
disks, USB memory sticks, etc pretty much all work. Wired network cards
aren't usually a problem, but wireless stuff is a pain. Basically look
for kit from companies that make specs and programming information
openly available to developers - their stuff will always be better
supported. Download a recent kernel, do "make menuconfig", and then read
through the hardware the kernel claims to support to do whatever you're
interested in. Buy from somewhere with a no quibble refund policy, or
from somewhere like Linux Emporium that sells Linux compatible hardware.
 Decide what you want to buy, and then put "<thing> linux support" into
Google. Oh, and (dons flameproof suit) don't buy anything from nVidia.

HTH

Mike
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