I’ve finally got linux working with wireless on my laptop with http://www.ubuntu.com/. It still didn’t work straight off the install, and I’m wondering why Network Manager isn’t the default by now, but after installing that, and the correct drivers for my wireless card to use with ndiswrapper (type lspci in the terminal and look for you wireless hardware info then find the drivers at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List), I had a wireless connection that could do WPA authentication in more than one place easily. Phew.
There were a few other small road bumps. Almost everything can be fixed or figured out with the help of ubuntuguide.com. Sound for flash didn’t work, which was a problem for youtube.com, but ubuntu guide had an entry for that. One of the first things you should do is run Automatix (there’s instructions for that on ubuntuguide.com also), which automatically downloads a ton of proprietary software than can’t be included with the open source Ubuntu install like mp3 and other audio and video codecs, Acrobat PDF reader and more. I wanted a utility to tell me where my disk space was like Treesize does for Windows and found baobab in the Synaptic package listing.
I was excited to see Google has some of their apps on linux, because I love Picasa for organizing photos. Google Earth is cool even if I rarely use it. I was even able to get some Windows apps installed with wine. So far I’ve been using this linux distro for about a week and haven’t needed to boot back into Windows for anything except Yahoo Music Player so that I can stream those damned DRM’d music files.
If any of my friends or family read this and want to try installing Ubuntu let me know and I’ll help. In many ways it really is better and easier than Windows, the main downside is you have to learn a whole new system which makes it seem harder at first. I don’t belive Linux will really take off in the Desktop arena in the U.S. until it comes preloaded on more computers, but that IS beginning to happen. Even if people don’t take the time to run linux or other ‘free software‘, it’s well worth understanding the philosophy and ethics behind free software.