[SWLUG] Re: Giving up Windows

[Steve Hill]

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On Wed, 2 Mar 2005, Peter Prior wrote:

> Not really IMHO.. Wireless cards tend to be hardware at least (no 
> softwireless cards).. most work with Linux drivers and those that don't

I'm afraid not - we're getting soft cards coming on the market (have been 
for a while now).  Which is why it's nigh on impossible to get a PrismGT 
card these days - coz they've all migrated over to the new SoftMAC 
Intersil Prism hardware (often without changing the model numbers of the 
cards so lots of people go get a card thinking it's supported and then end 
up with a completely different card that isn't supported at all but has 
the same model number).

> usually work with the ndiswrapper stuff (like my usb wifi adapter) so you an 
> use the vendors windows drivers under Linux.

Yes - ndiswrapper is fairly good, although you lose some features if you 
have to use it (no signal level reporting, no master mode and you can 
probably kiss goodbye to running something like Kismet on it).

Personally I have a pair of Intersil PrismGT cards - a PCI one for my 
server whcih runs in master mode (i.e. it's being an access point) and a 
cardbus one for my laptop.  They work well but I wouldn't want to try 
setting up the same thing today because I'd struggle to get hardware that 
can do that (I'd probably just settle for a hardware accesspoint and a 
ndiswrapper supported cardbus card).

  - Steve       Jabber: steve at nexusuk.org     Web: http://www.nexusuk.org/

      Servatis a periculum, servatis a maleficum - Whisper, Evanescence

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