Re: Wireless PCMCIA

Chong Yu Meng wrote:
On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 08:02 +1000, contact51 wrote:

I went and bought a PCMCIA card for my laptop hoping to be able to use
it.

Well there are quite a few wireless cards that work well with Linux.
Some require additional packages, while some work natively. If you want
something that "just works", I've found that Orinoco chipset-based cards
are detected automatically (in my experience, anyway). I have an older
NetGear MA401 PCMCIA card (802.11b only) that worked with FC3 without
needing to install additional software.

Then there are the Centrino notebooks with built-in wireless networking,
which require the firmware to be installed and a little bit of
configuration before the wireless networking works. My newer Asus
Centrino-based laptop requires me to install the ipw2200 firmware and
related drivers (which I get from Atrpms) initially, when I first
installed FC5. But after that, with the current kernel, I don't need to
do any further installation or configuration.

Then there are Atheros chipset-based wireless cards of which I have one:
another NetGear card, but PCI (for my desktop). You will need to install
MadWifi and do a bit of configuration with the network scripts. I have
had success with the madwifi rpms at Atrpms, and though each kernel
upgrade requires me to install the corresponding RPMs for MadWifi, it is
annoying at the beginning, but not difficult.

I have no experience with Broadcom-based wireless cards, so I cannot
comment. But some other people have tried it, and if you search the list
archives, you can probably find a suitable solution.

This is fine and I am sure it's good information but when I go to Walmart and pick a wireless adapter PCI card off the shelf how do I know what chip set it uses? I've searched for a list and found nothing. Perhaps I don't know the right keywords to search with?

I have some Linksys WMP54G "wireless pci adapter" cards requiring me to use ndiswrapper and suffer the inconvenience of dealing with that each time I update the kernel. It would be nice if I didn't have to do that. On this computer I use a Linksys WET54G "wireless ethernet bridge" which needs no driver and eliminates all those problems but is more expensive. With it and an ethernet switch I actually run this computer and a Windows XP box too.

Can anyone suggest a list of equipment using compatible devices?

Bob Goodwin

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