Wireless cards

Ian Malone ibm21 at cam.ac.uk
Thu Jun 30 10:58:28 UTC 2005



Brian Fahrlander wrote:
 > On Wed, 2005-06-29 at 20:34 -0700, jdow wrote:

 >> From: "John Summerfied" <debian at herakles.homelinux.org>
 >>
 >
 >>> I have a couple of Prism54 cards that work well.  Some (at least)
 >>> Atheros-based cards are fine, and I note d-link is now labelling its
 >>> product to indicate which use TI, which use Atheros.
 >
 >>
 >> Um, do you have the Linux driver for those atheros chips or are you
 >> using NDIS? And do you use WPA? My laptop will need to be WPA aware
 >> with the D-Link Atheros chipset three band beastie. (At least it will
 >> "someday.") I have the pieces. But it looks like I'll have to rebuild
 >> the Atheros stuff I have with the WPA files as well. Poo what a
 >> (small) annoyance.

 > Ya know, the way to sell cards of the vendors would be to suggest the
 > ones that work w/o NDIS on this list....and every other Linux list you
 > can find.
 >
 > Right now I couldn't possibly afford a laptop, but things can and
 > will change...and I'd like to know ahead of time.  In short:
 >
 > What kind of wireless card (say, the basic 11mps type) should I buy?
 >
 > Anyone?  Is there a series of decent gear?

<http://linux_wless.passys.nl/>, same (?) list, but with more
background at <http://www.seattlewireless.net/index.cgi/HardwareComparison>.
There was another page detailing the differences between various
manufacturers, but I can't find the link atm.

I'm using a Ralink rt2500 based EDI Max card (802.11g).  Ralink
have now GPLed drivers for their PCI, PC and USB cards which
makes them probably the best supported 11g cards.  However the
current driver is not entirely 4k stacks compatible, so if
you're not willing to roll your own kernel you will find it
occasionally locks up when attempting to connect.  A new
combined driver is under way.  It handles WPA, although you
might want to look at
<http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=8>.

In my limited experience the EDIMax stuff is cheap but solid.
(The home network I'm running with some friends has an EDIMax
AP and a Belkin modem/router AP, the Belkin is the one that
crashes all the time)

-- 
imalone




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