RE: wireless on debian

I'm looking at buying a wireless card for my laptop running debian
lenny
with 2.6.24-1.
the machine is i386 and has a pcmcia card slot.

What wireless card should I buy for this machine? And are there any
good
howtos out there on setting up wireless?
If so can someone please provide a url? I hear wireless drivers and
things have changed quite a bit in the recent kernels.

Thanks for any help,
Cheers,
--
Daniel Dalton

Before I start off I want to ensure that it is clear that this is my
personal opinion based off of my experiences.

I have never had good luck with any of the Broadcom cards under Linux. I
have had such miserable experiences with Broadcom that it is my
preference to rather have the plague then a Broadcom card.

I have a few cards that need the RaLink rt2x00 driver set. Under Debian
I have had many problems in the past with encryption (open wireless
worked perfectly, WEP got IP but couldn't ping google, TKIP failed).
Using Ubuntu, I was able to get them to work after a few days of work.

I have had great luck with the older Linksys PCMCIA cards. While I have
not used PCMCIA wireless in about 2 years, at one point I had 5
different Linksys cards that worked perfectly. Three years ago it was so
rare then to find a good wireless card that I took whatever I could get
my hands on. I am sure you will be able to find even more with the
recent advancements with wireless in Linux.

I now prefer Intel with the ipw driver set as I have never had many
problems getting them to work out of the box. I currently have the
Intel(r) 3945 and don't have a problem with it. Debian Lenny, Ubuntu
7.04-8.04, openSuSE 10.1 and the latest Fedora Core worked out of the
box. I am not sure if this is available as PCMCIA.

Since you are looking for a new wireless card, here is my suggestion on
what to do.
1) Check the Ubuntu listing of wireless cards. While some of the
descriptions are out of date, it is at least a good place to see what
kind of problems others are having or if it works out of the box.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/WirelessCardsSupported

2) Check the sites of vendors that guarantee Linux support on Laptops
and see what wireless cards they are backing. Most of these vendors want
to release a wireless card that just works so it is a good place to
start hunting. Here are a few such sites:
http://linuxcertified.com/linux_laptops.html
http://system76.com/index.php?cPath=28
http://www.dell.com/content/topics/segtopic.aspx/linux_3x?c=us&cs=19&l=e
n&s=dhs

I know that most of these sites have the wireless built in and you are
looking for a PCMCIA card, but if you can identify the chipsets that you
want then you can narrow down your search in the PCMCIA realm. You may
also want to look into the USB wireless cards simply because I see a lot
more of them then PCMCIA now (of course that is just my observation).

I am pretty sure I no longer have those PCMCIA cards, but I will look
when I get home. If I find any, I will post the model version.

Good luck and have fun!
~Stack~


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