Originally Posted by
SoManyMiles-SoLittleTime
I'm having a little trouble understanding the Ubuntu problems, 'cause when I load up Knoppix, from a stupid little CD with no configuration, it all seems to work, detects all the cards, wi-fi works, etc.
If Knoppix can be this simple, what's with Ubuntu?
(Now if I can only get Knoppix to actually boot from a thumb drive...but that's another issue).
The short answer is that Ubuntu has a philosophical ideology when it comes to some things like proprietary software. In the case of wi-fi, broadcomm, for example, doesnt provide any open source support so someone has to reverse engineer the drivers...or (again in the case of broadcomm) you can use the windows drivers in a "wrapper", that thats not FLOSS (free libre open source software) so unbuntu doesnt include it out of the box.
The longer answer is that we'd need to know more about specifically isn't working for you including make and model of chips/cards...
Feisty was a really nice improvement for some of those things and I understand the next release will have even more access to closed source stuff built in.