Please suggest a fedora core 4 compatible wireless card

[Temlakos]

Douglas Phillipson wrote:
> What wireless cards work with FC4 out of the box?  I'd rather not have 
> to install any drivers.  Please use common names, not chipsets in 
> responses unless you provide both.
> 
> Thank you, I really appreciate your help
> 
> Doug P
> 

At the risk of sounding like a former president of the USA in one of his 
more inglorious moments--it depends on what the meaning of the phrase 
"out-of-the-box" is. /No/ wireless card, AFAIK, will work without /some/ 
form of kernel module or driver wrapper to address it.

That said, I recommend the Netgear family of wireless cards, together 
with the kernel-module-madwifi package appropriate to whatever kernel 
you wish to run. These kernel modules are available on the livna 
repository, and they work. I use them myself.

Netgear uses chipsets built by Atheros Communications. I recommend that 
you go to the site http://www.atheros.com/ and run their excellent 
Product Search routine. You will find that Netgear is hardly the only 
wireless card maker to use Atheros chips--and you can even select 
specific models of cards, addressing whatever band you want to be on 
(802.11 a, b, and/or g). The list of companies, and card models, that 
should work with the kernel-module-madwifi packages is far too 
voluminous to post here--which goes to show that that chip has gotten 
very popular indeed.

You will no doubt also be interested in what models of laptop, that 
often have built-in wireless interfaces, will work with Fedora and these 
kernel modules. The Product Search will help you there, too. Sony 
(including the VAIO family of laptops), Toshiba, IBM, NEC, HP/Compaq, 
and Fujitsu are the six brand names to choose here. (Warning: Dell is 
/not/ among those brands. I bought a Dell Inspiron, that did /not/ have 
built-in wireless, and then bought a Netgear card to make it connect.)

Temlakos