What's the exact model of wifi chipset/card you have? lspci can give some info about it. lspci -n as well. Apparently lspci -vv gives lots of extra info. It would be hard to tell what distro can work with your card without knowing what exact card. Not that I would have any idea, but other people might be able to help you with this info. You maybe be able to keep a stock distro, but just add a new repo to get a special prebuilt module for that distro/version. If you're lucky and trusting/desperate enough. bjb On Tue, Jul 22, 2014 at 01:59:17PM -0400, Brian Barber wrote: > Good afternoon, everyone. I have an older, not-exactly stock Dell Inspiron > 1501 (AMD 64-bit CPU, 4G RAM and a 120G SSD) that I want to use for general > purpose computing and for ingesting a bunch of video from older VHS and > MiniDV tapes. I have a USB RCA adapter and a FireWire PCExpress card to > help with this. > > Believe it or not, I cannot successfully install Ubuntu (various > versions) on it. It not only does not recognize the Broadcom wifi adapter, > it has some deep-seated hatred of it. I get kernel panics whenever the OS > tries to load modules for it, and I have made numerous attempts to fix this > with no joy. Google inspiron 1501linux wireless and see that I'm not alone > (and I'm a pretty seasoned Linux guy.) I must have tried everything > suggested in the first five pages of search results. > > Is there anyone on the list who can suggest a good disto to try anew. I > have used Debian-based distros for a loooong time, but I am wide open to > trying anything Debian-based, or not. The laptop is bare metal now. > Perhaps there is something nifty out there that is worth a shot. BTW, I > would rather not go the Slackware/Gentoo BIY route. > > Thanks, > Brian > _______________________________________________ > Linux mailing list > Linux [ at ] lists [ dot ] oclug [ dot ] on [ dot ] ca > http://oclug.on.ca/mailman/listinfo/linux ---end quoted text---