Re: Recommendations for wireless PCI card

On Jul 22, 3:13 pm, Shadow_7 <wwwShad...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
What about some prism54-based and realtek-based cards? I've just heard
about those and it seems that at least they are also supported under
linux. Do they work through that proprietary binary blob method?

Well, you've got to have drivers for said card.

ndiswrapper -http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/
wlan-ng -http://www.linux-wlan.org/
prism54 -http://prism54.org/
atmel -http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net/
bcm43xx -http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/

And then there's the extras that you might want to use with said cards.

airfart -http://airfart.sourceforge.net/
kismet -http://www.kismetwireless.net/
madwifi -http://madwifi.org/

And probably many many more I don't know about and didn't list here.

As far as manufacturers that support linux, I don't think there are many
if any. At least in terms of releasing linux drivers themselves. Some
have probably helped in the sense of giving specs under an NDA to
programmers to develop drivers. But as far as doing it in house before
the product was released, not likely.

I see...

So it seems that in the end the best alternative is indeed an atheros-
based card. It may be based on a binary blob but at least the company
contributed directly to the madwifi project.

One last question. One downside of using ndiswrapper is that we are
limited by whatever windows driver is there. In my case, along with
other annoyances, it meant that I was forced to keep using a 32bit
release instead of migrating to a 64-bit OS. Does a binary blob driver
also comes with that sort of limitations? I've heard that some
drivers, like the realtek one, do not support SMP. Are there other
limitaitons?


Rui Maciel

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