[Eug-lug] Hello !

[Scott E Dumas]

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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