Re: [MLUG] recommended Linux-friendly PCI or USB wireless adapter?

["Jonathan King" <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On 5/3/07, Stephen Montgomery-Smith <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> Mark Rages wrote:
> > On 5/3/07, Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED> wrote:
> >> The other alternative is to find a robustly supported wireless card
> >> for the linux box (and its AMD64 kernel) that works well with Ubuntu
> >> 7.04. A USB 2.0 dongle thing would be okay, if any of those usually
> >> work with Linux, else we have PCI slots to work with (or even an extra
> >> firewire port, for that matter.
> >
> > Good luck finding a Linux-supported wireless card.  I drove all over
> > town once looking for one.  You'll probably end up with a PCMCIA
> > adapter and a laptop wireless card.
> >
> > The other other alternative is a short network cable to a wireless
> > bridge.  The better consumer routers can operate in this mode.  I'm
> > using a little dedicated bridge on my print server, the D-Link
> > DWL-800AP+.  It works, but I don't recommend this device.  The
> > firmware is lousy.
>
> I guess I had a different experience, at least wih FreeBSD.  They list
> all the supported cards on their web site, and the few I tried worked
> just fine.  But FreeBSD also comes with the ndis driver which in many
> cases allows FreeBSD to connect with the windows network driver.  I use
> this extremely successfully with my internal wireless card on my dell
> laptop.

My experience has been intermediate. The Cisco wireless card on the
ThinkPad A10 was decently well supported, except that there were very
puzzling issues occasionally on boot-up and/or after waking from sleep
(basically I had to manually reset the thing).

As it happens, I think the bridge idea is definitely the winner here,
because I believe I should be able to get an appropriate router/print
server, which would solve another longstanding annoyance on our
wireless network which is that the printers are both attached to a
computer that is not always awake when you want to print to it, which
given that it is in the basement of a three story townhouse, is quite
a nuisance. Also, I have never had a problem with getting a wired
connection to a Linux box working, even through a router using DHCP.

This is almost certainly a case where thinking outside "the box" (heh)
was the right thing to do.

> Anyway, a google search picks up quite a few hits for linux compatible
> wireless cards.

It does, but for each compatible wireless card there appears to exist
a large number of desperate posts trying to get it to work in some
particular situation. I agree that the situation is way better than it
used to be, but this is an area where Linux is not quite ready for
prime time.

jking

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