Wireless PCMCIA

Bob Goodwin bobgoodwin at wildblue.net
Thu Jul 13 15:35:51 UTC 2006


Chong Yu Meng wrote:
> 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. 
>
>   
This is fine and I am sure it's good information but when I go to 
Walmart and pick a wireless adapter PCI card off the shelf how do I know 
what chip set it uses?  I've searched for a list and found nothing.  
Perhaps I don't know the right keywords to search with?

I have some Linksys WMP54G "wireless pci adapter" cards requiring me to 
use ndiswrapper and suffer the inconvenience of dealing with that each 
time I update the kernel.  It would be nice if I didn't have to do 
that.  On this computer I use a Linksys WET54G "wireless ethernet 
bridge" which needs no driver and eliminates all those problems but is 
more expensive.  With it and an ethernet switch I actually run this 
computer and a Windows XP box too.

Can anyone suggest a list of equipment using compatible devices?

Bob Goodwin




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