Wireless AP w/ USB WLAN?

[Bob Chiodini]

On Thu, 2005-08-04 at 15:32 +0200, Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Am Do, den 04.08.2005 schrieb Belmin (Pub) um 4:46:
> 
> > I currently have a machine working as my router using Fedora. I have it 
> > setup perfectly with iptables. I'm looking to add wireless capabilities 
> > but my PCI slots are full. Anyone been successful using USB? I have no 
> > idea where to start (ie, what specifications should I look at when 
> > looking at USB hardware)?
> 
> You do not speak about what type of WLAN you request: is 802.11b (11
> MBit) enough or is 802.11g (54 MBit) requested? If 11MBit is sufficient
> you can watch out for old Prism chipset based sticks. If you ask me, I
> would anyway watch out for the quicker WLAN standard 802.11g. I recently
> pointed here on the list to
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/projects/zd1211/
> 
> while I can't say something specific about the stability of that open
> source kernel driver. A different open source driver project is
> 
> http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
> 
> where the rt2570 driver is for USB WLAN sticks. Lists of supported
> hardware are
> 
> http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Hardware
> http://ralink.rapla.net/
> 
> and can be used as a guide when watching out for hardware to buy.
> Hardware differs whether being able to run in AP mode or ad-hoc mode.
> 
> > I know with PCI it had to do something with making sure you could set 
> > the card to master. How does this apply to USB?
> 
> With "master" you speak about PCI busmaster mode? As far as I know USB
> it works differently. Simply plug&pray.
> 
> > Belmin Fernandez
> 
> Alexander

Inconsistencies in chipsets used by some manufacturers exists where the
same part number may encompass different chipsets, not all of which are
Linux friendly.

Here is yet another link:  

http://www.linux-wlan.org/docs/wlan_adapters.html.gz

Unfortunately there is no absolute way to tell what are getting.  It's a
crap shoot.

Bob...