Page 1 of linux wifi question

Hi every body,

I have an olde windows 98 pc that i`m thinking of trying ubuntu on
are there any internal/ pci wifi cards that are more suitable or indeed less suitable than others.
wpa security is needed without question

i`ve tried one of the atheros n type on my tower, a lot of agro and no success

thanks
jemma

This item was edited on Wednesday, 24th June 2009, 23:34

Your best bet would be look round the ubuntu forums, but my experience of playing with various Linuxes on my laptop is that they all work fine with its in built wireless card. Driver support in most modern Linuxes for hardware, even old hardware is excellent.

I`d say it`s probably best to stick with one made by a known manufacturer, as you`re more likely to find help should you need it.

How old is the PC you want to use? "The Linux Thread" is proof enough that I`ve played with loads, especially on my old PII450. If your PC is too old Ubuntu may be a bad choice, as the desktop environment in that is very fully featured so may not run too well on and old PC.

However saying that, the beauty of a live cd such as Ubuntu`s is you can give it a go without installing it.

first of all Admars-thanks for your reply.
I`ve tried the obvious like ubuntu.com


Our old PC in years terms i don`t know, but it was reasonable with windows 98. Most likely ridled with flees so a new os would help. Would you advise a differant linux distro


My own laptop is new---I`ve tried ubuntu on a flash drive and strongly believe that the problem is with wpa security. The wifi is an atheros 5008x, which is belkin with out the lable
i`ve dried a linux driver from wireless-driver just put www on the start an com on the end
but the download tells you nothing about how to open the download

I`ll have a look at your other postings

jemma

This item was edited on Thursday, 25th June 2009, 18:02

If you`re a Linux newbie Ubuntu really is a good place to start, as it does most of the hard work for you. If you find Ubuntu a bit slugggish, you could try XUbuntu which uses the XFCE desktop environment rather than Ubuntu`s GNOME, which may offer a bit of an improvement.

Failing that there are lightweight distros based on Ubuntu like u-lite and crunch bang

distrowatch is a good place to read about different distros.

Well known and respected lightweight distros (not based on Ubuntu) are

DSL (Damn Small Linux)
Puppy Linux
Vector Linux
Antix

What spec is the old PC, i.e. what processor and how much memory? My old PC is a PII 450 with about 640mb ram, the above distros run on that fine.

i`m not too knowledgeable about wireless security, what type of file did you download?

sometimes there isn`t a Linux driver but you can get a "wrapper" for the windows driver. So you downlaod the windows driver and then use another program to tell Linux to use that driver. I`ve not needed to do that. I think i tried a long time to do it on my laptop, couldn`t get it to work, got impatient so just tried a different Linux which did work!

the olde tower from memory is a pentium 3. It happens to be about 3 miles away

the linux drivers to run my laptop, the download has 2 choices, one ends in .tar.gz the other ends intarbz2


thanks
jemma

tar.gz
tar.bz

are popular compression methods. .zip is popular in windows, Unix/Linux tar creates a file of several files, gz and bz (gnu zip b zip) is then used to compress that file.

I think winzip and other compression tools (izarc probably) in windows can be used to look at contents of tar.gz or tar.bz

so in short, Linux versions of zip files, most distros come with a tool to unzip them, such as roller. the contents could be a file called make, and some c files, to compile etc. There should be a read me file to tell you what to do.

seriously have a look to see for real, the site is wireless-driver
the wifi card is an atheros ar5008x
there are no clues how to apply the down load

i remember years ago haveing a zx spectrum did not stop me doing the basics with a bbc micro, with the help of a manual

http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi/
www.madwifi.org

"seriously" download the file, extract it, read the readme file, which says
Quote:
The procedure to build the driver is described in the file INSTALL.

if using ubuntu, you`ll probably have to be root to do the command line stuff, so either append sudo before the command, or in a shell sudo su - so you become root and can then do it.

eg if says enter the command

make

type

sudo make

This item was edited on Friday, 26th June 2009, 06:44

you`ve lost me!

Can you not get on the net with your Linux straight "out of the box" then? Just click the network manager icon on the panel, and connect to your network there. Make sure you know the passwords for your connection etc. You shouldn`t have any bother with that really.

I have a tendency to think that if it doesn`t just work, then you`ll have a fight on your hands otherwise shoehorning drivers and wrappers etc, and it`s often best to just try another distro altogether. Wi-Fi can be a pain in Linux for some cards, so it`s best to download a couple of different ones to see if they work straight away and without any fiddling. Like Admars says, give Mint a go. It tends to be a bit easier to set up on the net than some other OS`s.

Let us know.

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This item was edited on Friday, 26th June 2009, 19:14