Linux Distros - M570U

In my quest to get a fully working linux distro, I need help from you guys. What distros have you tried, and what is your success rate? What's working and what's not?

From my experience:

Ubuntu 7.10 [Gutsy Gibbon] - Everything except wireless
Linux Mint 4.0 [Daryna]- Everything except wireless
Gentoo [Version Unknown; had tried it a long time ago] - No X server, and no internet.


Fedora 8 - Under the microscope

 

Fedora is always a good choice, it has some drawbacks at times. Red Hat/Fedora is the one I have used the most. I have not yet looked at F8 yet, if you are considering it check out their support fourms to see if anyone is having a similar issue to yours before installing it. Unless you just want top try it out. It could be a good learning experience. Here is a link to a review of F8 it is fairly down to earth review:

http://lunapark6.com/category/technology

 

I have used Ubuntu 7.10 and had the wireless working (Intel 3945ABG) on my M570U.

I ditched ubuntu the other day and went to Fedora 8. I haven't looked back since and fedora feels more stable and less newbieish compared to ubuntu.

In fedora 8 I have wireless working fine. I would say give fedora a go.

What I haven't tested:

Bisoncam
Tv Tuner

What wireless card are you using Amol?


Steve

 

Same as yours . Is the network that you're connecting to WEP? My wireless card is technically working - in the sense that it does see my neighbor's WEP encrypted connection. But what it doesn't see is my own WPA2 encrypted network.

 

Amol, look around and see if you can get an .iso for 7.04 Ubuntu. It appears that it does not have the problems connecting to networks like 7.10.My guess is most of the distro's will have the same problem.

 

Yeah, I had received a reply from LinuxMint forum, and I reinstalled Linux Mint just to try it out. No luck. Going to revert back to Fedora 8 later on, and see what I can do.

Now the problem with Fedora 8: It doesn't show my wireless as "active" - no idea on how to solve that =/

Haha, I'm downloading different distros from college now; and burning them on college computers so that I can try them out. I can't burn them at home since the grub bootloader makes my DVD Drive invisible; and to get lilo, I need internet, and for internet I need a working distro

 

Welcome to the world of linux problems.

 

Lol. Oh well. Boohoo, I just wanted a 100% working Linux distro ; ;

 

I just got the 7.10 live to boot on this thing and everything seems to working right now. I will have to check the wifi later I can see a few networks which is better than I could see in vista. I will check when I get back home after doing the install thing today. But when I got up this morning I had a minor error in my raid setup. So I am going to do the install and then back up that way if it crashes I can just re-load everything. You can probably get your problem fixed in Fedora but it will take some research time. Fedora is a good distro but sometimes you have to compile/build drivers and some software to work right. I think I have gotten spoiled with the apt-get command it is a a lot easier then doing things in fedora.

 

Out of curiosity, what wireless card do you have?

 

I have the 4965N card in this system. I have 7.04 running on my sony SZ220 and it has the 3945 and it works with no issues that I have found in the last year. (both Ubuntu and Fedora 7) I booted 7.10 on it and played around for an hour or so and everything seemed to work for me. I need to clean a few things on it before doing the upgrade or maybe just a clean install, not sure yet though.

 

Is your network WPA/WPA2? Or WEP?

 

Right now I am not sure, I use mine on a lot of different networks. Some have encryption and some don't. My sony has traveled around the world about 3 times now with one or another distro of linux without to many problems. The truth is I have been using linux because I have had more porblems with xp/vista than was worth the trouble. I still keep MS around but just because I need if for certain apps and gaming.

I was complaining my internet was slow yesterday (and it is) but I boot into linux and pages were loading close to normal, booted back into vista and it was taking 2-3minutes (probably longer) in vista for a page to load.

 

That could be why, I'm using it on a WEP wireless network.

Do you mean that your wireless card isn't working at all with Fedora 8 or just on your WPA network? My wireless card worked fine on the first boot after the install, it actually connected to my neighbours non encrypted network automatically

Steve

 

Doesn't work at all =/

I'm in college; and I'm tempted to reboot to Linux Mint 4.0 just to check if my card works.

 

Just a thought, did you start the Network Manager service? That's the thing thats in the top right of the screen that lets you select which wifi network you want to connect to etc... Maybe the wifi is working but not connected to any network?

System/Administration/Services - Put a tick in the Network Manager box.

If it still isn't working check /var/log/messages to see if it detects the card when it boots up.

Steve

 

I know that it does detect my card, because it sees my neighbor's connection fine.

Edit: Downloading Frugalware Live CD. Let's see if that detects my wifi on the fly [lol, that rhymed ]

 

Whoa so the wireless network monitor doesn't work, apparently; but an "iwlist scan" command actually detects mah network with 24/100 health. Now that's an improvement. This is with Frugalware of course, but I hate the way it looks. It's absolutely craptastic (IMHO). Tempted to install that...

[Happy now, scooberdoober? ]

 

I was reading on the unbutu forum's and the was information that you may have to manually do the scan and run the configuration to make it work. There was also a scrpit listed there that could be setup to automaticly as well.

 

Could you provide a link to it please?

 

This link is a How To guide on setting up WPA2.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=318539

This is more the question and answers section on the guide.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=202834

You might have to read through it a few pages, but there was a lot of information here.

 

I've been a linux user for a few years now and I've had Kubuntu, Gentoo, and Arch all working perfectly on my M570U. I'm posting this from my current default, Arch, and haven't ever had a problem getting anything to work other than "grub". You really want to use "LILO" unless there is some newer BIOS than 1.0.6(?) that fixes the problem with accessing the DVD drive seen when using the grub bootloader.

My laptop specs:

• Core 2 Duo T7200 @ 2.0 GHz
• 2GB RAM
• 100GB HD @ 7200rpm
• Nvidia 7950 GTX 512MB
• Intel 3945 (802.11g)

btw - I use the "amd64" distributions, not the 32-bit versions. That territory comes with its own quirks, depending on the distro, but even in the worst case isn't a large problem at all.

Finally, I do use WPA at my home as my default network connectivity encryption standard, but don't have WPA2. I can't imagine it being too different however, because Intel has been good about releasing drivers for both the 3945 and the 4965 chips...

 

sabayon was the only distro i tried that correctly identified my 8700m

Nox

 

It seems under Ubuntu 7.10 there are some problems with WPA2 not sure why. But Arch could be worth a look at. I have heard a lot of good about it.