Wireless LAN cards for Fedora?

[Bill Davidsen]

Nifty Fedora Mitch wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 26, 2008 at 06:23:10AM +0100, Colin Paul Adams wrote:
>> I want to connect an AMD64 machine (currently running 32-bit Fedora
>> Core 6, although I might upgrade to Fedora 9 64-bit or 32-bit) to a
>> wireless LAN. Can I just buy any cheap wireless LAN card, or are there
>> gotchas to be aware of?
> 
> Wireless is a tangle.
> 
> Not all work and not all parts have the same devices on the inside
> despite having nearly the same make and model on the outside.
> 
> Is your machine a laptop? 
> What wireless bands, frequencies, types etc are important.
> You are in the UK so my US centric history may miss the mark
> so here are some general thoughts.
> 
> Have you done a net search and found:
> 
>   http://fedoramobile.org/wireless/
> 
> you will find four types of card and some 32bit .vs. 64 bit issues
> to double the problem space.
>    
> 	unsupported and unsupportable
> 	reverse engineered
> 	ndiswrapper over windows driver
> 	fully disclosed public driver.
> 
> Shop for hardware in the fully disclosed public driver class that maps to your wireless
> needs.  Look at vendor sites and write letters and email asking for
> Linux support if you cannot find it.   Linux users do need some 
> help from the wireless vendors....  some are stepping up so do look
> and do fill out the "was this helpful" survey....  Do it from
> each new DHCP address you get and from each 'hotspot' you visit...
> and all the throw away email addresses you have ;-)
> 
> If you can find a supported/works USB wireless device you will find that
> to be the quickest to test.  About 20% of the USB devices just work.
> A USB device can be very handy on the 'next' laptop.  I have some that 
> don't but were only $9.
> 
> "lspci" tells me that this laptop has a:
> 
>   03:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
> 
> The driver is the b43 driver.
>   "A Linux driver for the Broadcom b43 wireless chips. Broadcom never released details about these chips 
>   so this driver is based upon reverse engineered ..." 
>   http://fedorasolved.org/mobile/fc-wireless/bcm43xx-yum-extras
> 
> Wireless is the primary reason I have a 32 bit version of fedora
> on this laptop and not a 64 bit version....
> 
Let's try again...

My Acer say:
05:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4310 USB Controller 
(rev 01)
         Subsystem: Foxconn International, Inc. Unknown device e003

and that doesn't work, even loading the b43, or b43legacy, or b44 
driver. So now I have a lovely postable desktop, until I find a USB 
wireless which works.

And until I find one I will have to try to get the WinXP driver working 
in ndiswrapper. If there was a USB or PCMCIA which worked right I would 
just forget about built-in, it's about 85% non-working and slightly more 
working partially.

My fault for not going Intel, the ipw2200 stuff used in "Celeron" works 
quite well.
> 
> 
> 
>