Mandriva hardware management

[PartisanEntity]

I tried out the live cd version of Mandriva One last night on my laptop.

In the control panel there was a button to set up wifi, the wifi wizard identified my bcm4306 chipset and informed that it did not have any drivers for it and whether I would like to install any.

I pointed it to towards my usb stick and it installed my wifi card. Then it showed me all the available networks in my area.

I selected my own wpa encrypted home network, a password window popped up, I entered my passphrase and was online.

The whole thing took 2-3 minutes. And I was really impressed.

What's holding Ubuntu back from such implementation (excuse my ignorance if this is common knowledge).

[igknighted]

I tried out the live cd version of Mandriva One last night on my laptop.

In the control panel there was a button to set up wifi, the wifi wizard identified my bcm4306 chipset and informed that it did not have any drivers for it and whether I would like to install any.

I pointed it to towards my usb stick and it installed my wifi card. Then it showed me all the available networks in my area.

I selected my own wpa encrypted home network, a password window popped up, I entered my passphrase and was online.

The whole thing took 2-3 minutes. And I was really impressed.

What's holding Ubuntu back from such implementation (excuse my ignorance if this is common knowledge).

I would say time... Ubuntu is a very young distro compared to Mandriva. Also, it could proprietary software in Mandriva (unless you chose the OSS version). All in all, there is much more Ubuntu could do. Mepis configures my Atheros wifi perfectly OOTB. I know nothing about what drivers it uses and don't even use the card (I just ran Mepis from the live CD and was impressed), so it could be proprietary stuff installed. However, this is certainly an area where linux could improve.