I tinker with different distros a lot. I recently installed MEPIS 6.0 on my HP Pavilion laptop with Broadcom 4306 modem. I've gone through a procession of distros on that machine and have never had consistent ability to connect via wireless. It worked for awhile with PCLINUXOS, but some update screwed things up - same with an earlier version of MEPIS. I never succeeded with FC. With the other two distros, I'd have to do a dance of reconfiguration and prayer every time I wanted to connect to a new network, and sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn't. With this latest version of MEPIS, it seemed I was going to have a similar experience - it did come up working, but it wasn't entirely reliable, nor intuitive. While troubleshooting my problem on the MEPIS forum, I was introduced to a program called wifi-radar. After fixing one other issue, this appears to be the balm that has solved all problems. I have been connecting to multiple networks today, going back and forth between office and home - after some minimal configuration, wifi-radar stores the profile for each network you connect to, and the next time you try, it just finds it and connects. I just looked, and this program is in Fedora extras. I've never seen it mentioned here on the list, so I bring it up in case it may help someone - Gene, are you reading this? -- Claude Jones Brunswick, MD, USA
