belkin wireless g+ desktop card support?

[Karen Spearel]

On Sun, 2006-01-29 at 15:20 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote: 
> On Saturday 28 Jan 2006 23:19, John Summerfied wrote:
> 
> >
> > broadcom is a great brand to avoid. Last Great Step Forward I head
> > from the broadcom reverse-engineers that they had fully documented
> > the interfaces and were ready to begin the Next Great Step. I got the
> > impression usable code was some way off.
> >
> My Acer laptop has a Broadcom wireless connection, using ipw2200.  It 
> works out-of-the-box with Mandriva.  I haven't tried it with FC4 yet, 
> but I see no reason why not.
> 
> Anne
> 
I've not seen the original poster show the output from lspci
(type /sbin/lspci -v  at the prompt in a Terminal from the
Applications/System Tools menu) here...perhaps I've not been following
closely enough...but my Belkin "Wireless G Desktop Card" (ver.5000 per
the box label) has a Atheros 5212 chip on it and hence I use the madwifi
kernel module from Livna with it.  At least one version of a commonly
available D-Link card also uses the 5212 so just dumping one card for
another may not help at all.  And yes, this driver gets snippy when
passed parameters from iwconfig that it doesn't understand (like mode
auto) but it works well here even when parameter problems aren't fixed
in ifcfg-ath0.

If you are picky about the ethics of using ndiswrapper and a Windoze
driver, Madwifi isn't quite as bad as those fully proprietary drivers,
but the HAL is closed so it isn't completely open...but I can't see it
as being appreciably worse that loading firmware on certain other
implementations.  At least Atheros seems to be trying to provide a
solution that both works for linux users and keeps the FCC off their
backs.  Until the cleanroom reverse engineering projects on other
chipsets is much further along, non-hacker Linux users have limited
choices...but the whole tangled mess is being organized under the
watchful eye of John Linville so there is hope. :) 

It ought to be clearly stated that a wireless card just ain't gonna play
unless you are loading the correct driver...trying to get the wrong
driver to work is less fun than beating yourself about the head and
shoulders with a ballpeen hammer...so guessing at the card's chipset
just won't cut it.  OEMs seem to have a penchant for changing chips on a
whim so that V1 of a card sold under a certain branding may be one thing
and V2 may be something entirely different...thus you need to run lspci
to see what was actually in the box.

As convenient as GUIs are, sometimes you can't get there from here
without running command line tools so getting a little comfortable with
Gnome Terminal (or the KDE equivalent) is going to save a lot of pain in
the long run.

HTH,
Karen