Replacing Broadcom miniPCI with Atheros

[Alan Santos]

Brian, as I mentioned to you privately, I would order the card and test 
it the first chance I get. I'm off to Italy for two weeks so that's the 
earliest chance I'd get to order one for my 6805.

I spoke with emachines support who told me that any minipci card should 
work, but wouldn't make any promises.

Maybe someone could explain if there's any way to determine the 
existance of a whitelist in the bios other than plugging the card in and 
seeing what happens. $80 won't break me, but I'd rather spend the money 
on something I can use instead of an ugly little paperweight.



Brian Stretch wrote:

> Yes, but it only works on 32-bit Linux, as this thread explains:
> 
> http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=4103096&forum_id=36471
> 
> I want to run 64-bit Fedora Core on my Athlon 64 notebook. 
> 
> Alan Cox pointed me to where the problem lies (thanks Alan!).  Like IBM,
> HP has a whitelist of approved wireless miniPCI cards in their BIOS.  Since
> the Atheros card is not on the whitelist and Broadcom's rectal-cranial
> inversion shows no sign of correcting, 64-bit Linux users are currently SOL. 
> I've got one of HP's research techs looking into this but I'm not very
> hopeful.  It's too bad, under Windows the wireless range is very impressive
> thanks to the two antenna panels integrated behind the screen.  Does
> anyone know whether eMachines has a similar whitelist in their Athlon 64
> notebooks?  What about ASUS and Acer, etc?  
>