Lenovo S10 Netbook: Fabulous Hardware, Yuck Software

except for the case they appear to be identical.

*Belch* Carla said: "*Belch*" Thats a new tech term for me but I will bet its right on the mark.

http://mt.buetow.org/comp/2009/01/my-ideapad-s10e.html

Looks pretty compatible,

But it has Broadcom wireless. The worst experience I've ever had with Linux has been using Broadcom wireless. Run far, far away. Buy anything else.

Not to mention using ndiswrapper on a Debian system is a mortal sin.

Actually the Gateway laptop we had here (until it died an ugly premature death) had Broadcom wireless and it worked really well under Ubuntu or openSUSE.

Recent versions of Mandriva work just fine with Broadcom WiFi. I made a load of Acer laptops dual boot Mandriva with Vista and Mandriva picked up and had the WiFi working no problem.

Are Mandriva et al using ndiswrapper, or is there a native GPL Broadcom driver?

It's not ndiswrapper, TC. I installed Mandriva Free and I *think* that is only FOSS.

There are FOSS broadcom drivers out there, but they don't work on all broadcom chipsets and they're only in really new kernels.

Sander is right. I'm pretty sure we used ndiswrapper on the Gateway. I know we did on SUSE.

bigg, >But it has Broadcom wireless. The worst experience I've ever had with Linux has been using Broadcom wireless. Run far, far away. Buy anything else.

Apparently there is disagreement on this:

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r22035785-

Some bcm chipsets (such as the bcm4318 I believe) have the drivers in the kernel or available (generally newer kernels). However last time I messed with one (probably a few months ago or so), you still needed to rip the firmware out of a windows driver for it to work.

About a year ago...maybe late Fall of '07...I tried Mandriva, Mepis and Ubuntu on a new laptop with broadcom wireless and they all used ndiswrapper. I forgot which, but one of them downloaded and installed the Windows driver for you, which made it painless and seamless....it was probably Mepis due to the dubious licensing (which doesn't bother me in the least, as long as it works).

I have recently tired the open-source drivers and they worked fine now, so sometimes it just takes a while for FOSS to catch up with new chip releases.

My Mom's machine has a Broadcom chip, and someone posted the binary blob as a .DEB for Ubuntu. Worked fine for Linux.

But I never did get wicd or knetworkmanager working correctly, so I had to put my local wifi in /etc/network/interfaces hard coded. Bad, bad juju.

She's going to mail it to me soon, since she just cannot get it to connect to anyone else's wireless, and it's making it impossible for her to say to her friends, "Look at this wonderful Linux system my Son put together for me."

When I come crawling back here saying "help me! help me!" I hope no one laughs...

We'll laugh, and then we'll help.