Wireless PCMCIA

[Chong Yu Meng]

On Wed, 2006-07-12 at 08:02 +1000, contact51 wrote:

> I went and bought a PCMCIA card for my laptop hoping to be able to use
> it.
>  

Well there are quite a few wireless cards that work well with Linux.
Some require additional packages, while some work natively. If you want
something that "just works", I've found that Orinoco chipset-based cards
are detected automatically (in my experience, anyway). I have an older
NetGear MA401 PCMCIA card (802.11b only) that worked with FC3 without
needing to install additional software.

Then there are the Centrino notebooks with built-in wireless networking,
which require the firmware to be installed and a little bit of
configuration before the wireless networking works. My newer Asus
Centrino-based laptop requires me to install the ipw2200 firmware and
related drivers (which I get from Atrpms) initially, when I first
installed FC5. But after that, with the current kernel, I don't need to
do any further installation or configuration.

Then there are Atheros chipset-based wireless cards of which I have one:
another NetGear card, but PCI (for my desktop). You will need to install
MadWifi and do a bit of configuration with the network scripts. I have
had success with the madwifi rpms at Atrpms, and though each kernel
upgrade requires me to install the corresponding RPMs for MadWifi, it is
annoying at the beginning, but not difficult.

I have no experience with Broadcom-based wireless cards, so I cannot
comment. But some other people have tried it, and if you search the list
archives, you can probably find a suitable solution. 

-- 
Pascal Chong 
email:  chongym at cymulacrum.net 
web:    http://cymulacrum.net
pgp:    http://cymulacrum.net/pgp/cymulacrum.asc

"La science ne connaît pas de frontière parce que la connaissance
appartient à l’humanité. et que c’est la flamme qui illumine le monde."

-- Louis Pasteur
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