ok, im going to start off by saying i am a newbee so some of the stuff i say may not be right.
but anyways, right now i am using ubuntu hardy for my main distrobution. i love it and all, but the main reason i switched to linux (besides drm and the blue screen i see on my comp about ten times a year) is the low price and the ability to change it. and ubuntu to me doesnt need changing on my part. so i was thinking of partitioning half my hard drive to pure debian and start creating my own distrobution off of that. the only problem i have with debian is internet. i have an ibm bus card 802.11 b/g. on the hardware drivers screen on ubuntu it shows it as an atheros card. and i remembered reading that most atheros wireless cards dont work with most linux distrobutions due to its non public source code. and since i cant change the source code, i was wondering this question: is there any software out there for debian for atheros cards or should i just save up like $50 and buy a new wireless card?
also, if there is a better linux distrobution out there(perferably debian based) that is better for working with to learn how to change it, please let me know?

isn't it possible to switch to a "wired" network? you might get away from a lot of problems... one ist security... and the other is problems with drivers...

im using a laptop. my router is in the basement and i use my laptop about everywhere but my basement. like on my kitchen table for my homework or at a coffee shop and stuff like that so wireless is a big issue. my parents got really made the last time i got a 100 foot cable and had it running throught the house so i could do my homework on the kitchen table. a "wired" network is a good idea, but it limits me in a lot of ways.

You can usually get the same drivers you have on Ubuntu, you just need to know what they are and maybe peek a little bit under the hood how they are configured. If they are "restricted" then they are not available as part of Debian proper, but you can get them from the same place as Ubuntu gets them, or maybe even retrofit the Ubuntu drivers if you're a little clever.

Knoppix is a live distro which I believe has a rather vocal customization community, and it's Debian-based. Maybe you want to try that. It's sort of leaning towards Ubuntu in that they take drivers where they can get them, regardless of those pesky firmware licensing issues, but it should be one of the easiest to get rolling.

thx for the tip era
it gave me the genius idea to go to google and get driver help. i got the page (Linuxant - DriverLoader for Wireless LAN devices - Introduction) and everyone says that it works. the only problem is that i think it is a free trial software so i dont know how long it would work on my comp. now my question would be, what book would give me the information to get the driver lists in knoppix/ubuntu and how to make them work (the line of code i mean). i have alot of linux books on pdf and i could get another if i had to.

i wont be able to say what happens for a little while since i dont have debian installed at the moment
i have a partition on my laptop that will usually changes grub booting distributions every week or so to find a good one to use for learning kinda like raw CLI linux. i have to install debian sometime this week and try it out. ill try to get to the installation soon.

The specifics of how to identify your wlan depends on which bus it's attached to. For an on-board WLAN card that would be PCI, or perhaps USB these days I guess. So get the lspci / lsusb (and lspci -v -v / lsusb -v -v) output and correlate that with the output from lsmod and you should be on your way. The startup messages in dmesg are also helpful although often somewhat cryptic; although certainly not more so than the lsmod driver names.

As for "bare-bones CLI-only" Linux, I am quite comfortable with Ubuntu as a front-end for the command line (and very little beyond the command line -- Emacs, and my browser, and my music player, and occasionally the photo viewer). If you really wanna go hardcore I guess you will be looking at Gentoo soon enough, though (-:

ok. i ran 'lspci -v -v' in terminal. i know for a fact that my bus card is atheros, so i going to show the output that i got that stated atheros.

03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5212/AR5213 Multiprotocol MAC/baseband processor (rev 01)
Subsystem: Actiontec Electronics Inc IBM HighRate 11 a/b/g Wireless CardBus Adapter
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR- FastB2B-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B+ ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR-
Latency: 168 (2500ns min, 7000ns max), Cache Line Size: 128 bytes
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 11
Region 0: Memory at c4000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: <access denied>



can someone tell me what i would do from here to get this driver over the another os that doesnt have the driver. plz and thank you

The key here is the vendor and device code returned by lspci -n which is used by the kernel to look for the appropriate driver. In this case I guess you want the ath_cb driver for a CardBus interface. I believe the hotplug facility is still responsible for mapping a device to a driver and doing the driver loading.

I seem to have the same device; the vendor and device code for mine is 168c:0013 -- googling for that quickly turns up Madwifi as an apparently fully supported completely open-source driver (as indeed I have found to be the case).

As for how to go the other way around, figure out that PCI device 03:00.0 is managed by lsmod module so-and-so, I really only have vague ideas. Look in /proc/bus/pci, /proc/net and so forth.

Couple of suggestions for texasone:

Instead of Linuxant, you can try ndiswrapper. Its free, and works great but a little more involved. Head over to the Ubuntu/Debian forums and you shall come to know how to do this.

i found that madwifi has the ati driver i need and the nvidia driver that i will need when i get a new card. now my question is this: can i modify the iso file on my computer before burning the disk. kinda like dreamlinux. i have tried dream linux out and i like the ability to change the iso before burning, and can i do that with debian and add things like madwifi so i dont have to bother trying to find an ethernet cord and connect it to my router. would i just add the tar.gz file to the iso file or would i have to install the drivers when the OS is completely installed?

..well, as a Debian user myself (my main OS being Solaris), I'd suggest you don't waste time trying to load Ubuntu and Debian on the same box. They're practically the same, with Ubuntu the more newbie-friendly. If you want to learn, I'd suggest you stick with one, learn it fairly well, then jump to other distributions like SuSE or RH , because then you have a better grasp of a Linux-based OS and it will be easier for you to see the differences among the distributions.

As for the atheros-based wireless card, atheros is probably the more common chipset, and should be pretty easy to make it work using ndiswrapper, using Windows drivers.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Wi...er/Ndiswrapper

The install CD should contain the necessary drivers, it's another thing whether the installer discovers the devices properly and configures the system to use the correct drivers. You can nudge it in the right direction by passing in parameters to the installer but I can't really say more about that particular topic. Look for OEM instructions for the installer; they should cover this.

You might look at www.forumubuntusoftware.com for a look at a rehash of ubuntu known as ultimate edition.There are several options there to build your own distro and most of the tools you would need to do it.