PCMCIA wireless cards....\'just works\'?

[Joel Jaeggli]

On Sun, 19 Dec 2004, Ryan D'Baisse wrote:

> On Sun, 19 Dec 2004 08:48:37 -0800 (PST), Joel Jaeggli
> <joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu> wrote:
>>
>> That strikes me as a little lazy. To my mind the comparativly minor2
>> inconvenience of rebuilding the mad-wifi source rpm when you install a new
>> kernel rpm is worth it to unlock the potential of an atheros a/b/g card.
>>
>
> I wouldn't  necessarily classify him as lazy.  Many of us who are
> coming to Linux from other operating systems have an ingrained belief
> that if the OS can handle something by default that it must be better.
> And while I understand that it is common for people in the Linux
> world to recompile kernels and hack away at config files to get
> something working, I would opt for a solution where it "just works."
> Being able to plug a card in and have it recognized gives a sense,
> albeit potentially false, of all things being good and the likelihood
> of a problem being reduced.

The probablity of a modern wireless card having a built-in driver in 
windows xp/2k/98 is zero. so you're going to have to install a driver 
there as well which is apparently not something people look forward to 
with much trebidation...

We mostly dinguish between cards which have drivers in the kernel (prism, 
hermes, cisco) cards which have drivers (amtel, intel (b), atheros) and 
cards that require to load the windows ndis driver (broadcom, intel g, ti, 
realtek, marvell)

at this point the ones with decent drivers require little if any hacking, 
ndis in my opinion should be avoided if at all possible.

> Just my $0.198376646.
>
> R/S
> Ryan
>
>

-- 
-------------------------------------------------------------------------- 
Joel Jaeggli  	       Unix Consulting 	       joelja at darkwing.uoregon.edu 
GPG Key Fingerprint:     5C6E 0104 BAF0 40B0 5BD3 C38B F000 35AB B67F 56B2