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Odd, the built-in 802.11g card in this Toshiba Tecra M2 works just fine with Debian. Just booted it up and it worked.

Linux hasn't worked with 5 of the wireless cards that I've tried -- and, in fact, crashes in several cases with the supplied driver. Cisco Aironet, Orinoco, Linksys, Intel Pro/Wireless, Lucent WaveLAN. Considering that the vendor "workaround" is to recompile the drivers, edit configuration files, and basically waste about 3 or 4 days in endless nonsense, I'm not going to waste any more time on it. You won't admit it (you're a zealot, after all) but Linux Wireless just ain't there yet.

It's not my fault, nor is it the fault of Linux, if you have a built-in bias against Linux which colors your ability to pop in a friggin CD, boot up, and use wireless.

Or perhaps it's that third-party crap you've been harping about, eh?

Nope, that can't be it, since the Netgear card in my Dell has an Orinoco chipset. The Cisco card my cube neighbor has works fine too. So does the Lucent card, Linksys and even the Intel Centrino built-in wireless chipset. All without recompiling.

I and every person at the local LUG uses 802.11 at every meeting. There are generally 30-50 people in the room, with varying types of wireless, built-in, PCMCIA and PCI cards, and I've not heard of a single instance where a recent version of a mainstream Linux distro wouldn't operate simply by opening a GUI app, typing in the ESSID and encryption keys and clicking OK.

We have beginners that have never used Linux come in. We give them a Knoppix CD and they are browsing using the wireless AP in under a minute.

So I have to conclude that it's not Linux, it's not new users, it's not the hardware...

It's just you.

Cisco Aironet, Orinoco, Linksys, Intel Pro/Wireless, Lucent WaveLAN. Considering that the vendor "workaround" is to recompile the drivers, edit configuration files, and basically waste about 3 or 4 days in endless nonsense, I'm not going to waste any more time on it.

WaveLAN is a little old, but I've got the Orinoco and Linksys cards to work with the standard Prism2 drivers. Oh, and the old D-Link Air cards too.

Here's the resource I used: http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/

Several of us have now stated that we've got the stuff to work. If it's too difficult for you, if it's a waste of your time, then go back to Windows and be happy.

Thats Kinda funny because other than changing the order of services on one distro (Fedora C2), I have never had trouble with a wireless card.. I have never even needed vendor drivers the ones included in the distro take care of Orinoco, Linksys, and Intel Pro/Wireless devices (I have never tried the others)

The order of servicesin fedora is troublesome but nothing a quick chkconfig wont fix..