[Turbopilot]

This was on a pretty new notebook with a built-in Intel Pro 2200b/g card, which is as close to a generic standard as it gets. In searching various forums, distro wikis, etc. I learned that I either do or do not need NDISWrapper and I either can or cannot use it while booted from a LiveCD. Obviously I didn't get very far with that.

The other problem is wireless security. As far as I could tell none of the distros I tried supported WPA2, or even WPA. I may have tried disabling security with a couple distros, but I was never able to connect and I'm not willing to give up security anyway.

It's a shame, because I had gotten curious and really wanted to try Linux as an experiment. I figured as long as I could boot and get online, I could look up how to do everything else. But I finally had to give up on it after enough web searching convinced me that it wasn't just me - Linux appears to make wi-fi tough on everyone.

The distros I tried and failed to get online with were Knoppix 4.0.2, MEPIS 3.4.3, Ubuntu 5.10, SuSe 9.3, and SuSe 10.0. If you know of one that is up to speed with native wi-fi support, by all means let us know.

[zeugma]

My laptop has an Intel 2200 card. What you need to make it work is firmware.

The page for the Intel 2200 drivers is at  http://ipw2200.sourceforge.net/

You need the IPW2200 binary firmware image. The firmware can be obtained here. Download the appropos firmware, and copy the files to

/lib/firmware/

I'm not sure why the firmware can't be a part of the distribution, but you can probably thank someone in washington for that.

[zeugma]

BTW, I've got the latest knoppix (v5.0) and kubuntu at home. I'll let you know if they work natively on my laptop.