wireles

[Kevin Kofler]

Frank S. <franklinux392 <at> yahoo.com> writes:
> Sorry to bother you I know  i should ask this questions in a forum but i have 
try with no result so:I need to get a wireless wifi PC card for my laptop and a 
pci wifi card for my desktop, I do NOT want to use Ndiswrap or anything similar 
to that I would to get one that works out of the box, PLEASE could you 
recommend me one Thank you very much

Unfortunately, as others have already said, there isn't really something which 
works out of the box except for older 802.11b-only chipsets. There are 
currently 4 categories of drivers I can think of:
1. driver (GPL) in the kernel, but needs a separate firmware download (under a 
restrictive license). Examples: ipw2100, ipw2200, bcm43xx.
2. GPL driver, no firmware download required, but not merged yet. Examples: 
rt2400, rt2500, rt2570, rtl8180. See the rest of my e-mail for details.
3. GPL driver, not merged yet, requires separate firmware. Examples: rt61, 
rt73.
4. Instead of or in addition to the firmware, the driver has some other 
proprietary portions. Examples: ipw3945 (binary regulatory daemon), madwifi 
(for Atheros cards, uses a binary hardware abstraction layer).

One solution if you don't want binary firmware is Ralink rt2500-based cards 
(there's a USB version called rt2570, the PCI and PC Card versions are called 
rt2500). These have a GPL driver and don't need binary firmware (presumably, 
they have some firmware on a ROM on the chip, but you don't have to deal with 
licenses or separate downloads). The downside is that the driver is 
out-of-tree, so it has to be built separately. However, the newer rt2x00 driver 
which also supports these chipsets is under review for Extras. I don't know 
when or if it will be approved though. The nice thing about rt2500/2570 is that 
these support 54 Mbps 802.11g, unlike old chipsets like Orinoco, the drawback 
is that the drivers are still not in the kernel (they want to get rt2x00 
working because the original driver is essentially a port of Ralink's Window$ 
driver which isn't ideal for Linux, and rt2x00 1. is not finished and 2. is 
waiting for the DeviceScape 802.11 stack to go into the kernel first, this 
problem has already been mentioned).

Be warned though that the newer rt61 (PCI/PC-Card) and rt73 (USB) chips do need 
a firmware binary downloadable from the Ralink site, with no license text 
attached at all (so you can only guess at what the terms are, no 
redistribution, I assume), at least that was the situation last I checked.

As another 802.11g option, Realtek 8180 chips also work without firmware 
downloads and with a GPL-ed driver, but that hasn't been merged into the kernel 
either. I don't know what the status of that driver is.

        Kevin Kofler