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I was pleasantly surprised to find that that the distro
PCLINUX0S has native support for many chipsets common in wireless radio cards!
Furthermore, it also has excellent support for Ati and Nvidia driver
recompiling. Unlike Mandriva 2007 and Suse 10, this distro is free of the Novell
proprietary issues regarding 3d acceleration on the desktop. I understand that beginning with kernel version 2.6.17,
their will be native support for the ubiquitous BCM43XX driver for wireless cards.
The current version of pclinuxos is built upon kernel 2.6.16.27.tex1.1ve…. I compiled my Nvidia driver using the source for this
kernel, but being that as it may, I would have to use the BCM43xx-fwcutter to
extract the firmware for the Broadcom driver .sys or use the Linuxant
driverloader. I have had success with this, but I had to pay $20.00 to use it
with the exclusive MAC address on that card only !! The process of
extracting the firmware with the fwcutter is difficult for me at this time,
being that it is relatively new to wikis and complicated for anyone! Is it possible to do a fresh install of an OS, then
update the kernel to 2.6.17 then compile the Nvidia driver and get native
support for Broadcom 43XX wireless cards ? Mike I once asked you if one (enduser)
could update the kernel in a Distro…this is where I was coming from ! So
many times I see posts showing how to configure wireless chipsets in a
particular kernel version using a particular ndiswrapper version and even a
particular driver compiler…no wonder so many posts are uploaded with
frustration and tales of failure!! One may ask why, and I can answer this obvious question. From
my survey of chipset/cards available for native wireless support in linux with
both 802.11g and advanced wpa psk or better, The choice of cards narrows. The
common cards readily available are most typically Broadcom chipset cards like
Belken F5d7001 ver 1212 (Broadcom BCM4318 Airforce One rev. 2) and
Linksys Wmp54G ver 4/4.5 (Broadcom (strangely enough). As you may all
know, the industry has been migrating to the Broadcom radios lately, thus the
impetus for incorporating native support. From what I have read, native support
for the 802.11n is a ways off. More times than not these two hardware driver set-ups
can be the configuration bottleneck with the new distros on 586 or 64bit
machines for the end home user. This is my goal..to know how and show how to
run linux with advanced 3d hardware acceleration and 802.11g wireless support
for the typical multi-application end user configuration to migrate to Linux !
from what I gather, this is also the goals of Suse10, mandrake and notably
PCLINUXOS. Obviously, this has been quite an exercise in learning to
configure Linux on the modern pc/laptop equipped with multimedia and wifi
capabilities for a newcomer ! Thank you for your |
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