[Glastonbury] Hello again and thanks - Wireless Cards in Linux

[Andrew M.A. Cater]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2005 at 07:27:02PM +0000, Kelvin McNulty wrote:
> On Thursday 13 January 2005 17:23, Phil Wood wrote:
> ...
> > At the end of the month I hope to have the time for another attempt to
> > get my laptop wireless using Linux. So the next meeting could be just at
> > the right time for me. In the mean time of any of you have been
> > successful in this I'd love to hear from you. Which distribution? Which
> > wireless card?
> 
This is very much the "here be dragons" end of Linux. WiFi is expanding
rapidly and diversifying - older cards may be well supported, however.

Part of the problem is that the technology is changing - older/slower cards
often had firmware built in - they "just worked". Newer cards (often
based on ARM7 processor cores) are configurable by downloadable
firmware: software drivers are "uploaded" to the card at initialisation
to get it to boot at all. Most of the device specifications are heavily 
proprietary. The design, production and availability lifetime for one 
chipset revision can be as low as 3-4 months.

The cards also change rapidly - I have a PCI card for one of my
machines. Common - it's a Netgear WG311v2 54M/b 802.11a/b/g card. Major
manufacturer, whose ubiquitous Ethernet cards are supported everywhere
under Linux, whose wireless network access point WG602 (which I have)
runs Linux internally.  Fine - except that the 311v1 is readily
supportable in a standard kernel. The 311v2 isn't - it's a proprietary
Texas Instruments chip set. There are three solutions: 

a.) Pay Connexant for their Linuxant commercial drivers which allow you to load the Windows [98/2000/XP] drivers from the Windows CD driver disk and fools the
kernel and interfaces into loading the firmware from there. Only about
$20 but you may have to update every time you change your kernel.

b.) Use the NDiswrapper scripts (ndiswrapper at Sourceforge somewhere.)
This is essentially the free software which underlies the Linuxant
stuff. Using the Windows drivers does mean that some features may not
work well/at all - low level network sniffing using kismet/air snort,
for example, may not be possible.

c.) An extremely alpha quality acx111 kernel driver which loads the
Windows firmware blob. Very similar problems exist for the Intel
Centrino drivers.

This is the sort of issue which can have you tearing your hair out
_very_ fast. Orinoco/Aironet/Prism drivers work well and are supported 
in the kernel but may only be 11M/b. [See below].

Ubuntu is Debian based and therefore includes the common drivers easily
available to all the distributions. Hardware configuration and detection
is also good. [Not to say that you can't do the same/similar with
SuSE/Mandrake/Fedora - or indeed, Slackware or Gentoo].

> Buffalo Air Station 11Meg (802.11b) card, model no. WLI-PCM-L11GP under SuSE 
> 8.1, has been running really well for nearly 2 years. It was installed for me 
> by some guys from Psand (see Google) at a festival where they were running a 
> wireless network with satellite uplink. They did not have to install a 
> handler, they just wrote a bit of config, and it worked! I was so delighted, 
> really fast surfing while sitting in a field was wonderful! They said the OS 
> has everything in it to handle the card - an Orinoco chipset, or something. 
> If you want to try it, write to me off list and we'll arrange something. Or I 
> can tell you the config that I know.
> 

Check with the retailer when you buy a card. Check with the Linux for
Laptops pages and the appropriate WiFi HOWTO's. Use Google to check
chipset details. Take care: it's a jungle out there.

HTH,

Andy