[Gllug] wifi card

[Peter Grandi]

>>> On Fri, 29 Jul 2005 15:47:03 +0100, Alain Williams
>>> <addw at phcomp.co.uk> said:

addw> [ ... ] Can someone please recommend one that will just
addw> work in my Fedora Core 4 laptop. [ ... ]

First, this is the right approach -- check before buying instead
of buying and hope it will be all right :-).

Unfortunately for WiFi things are not so easy; because support
is by chipset, and manufacturers have the extremely annoying
habit of changing the chips they put into a product without
changing the product name (except sometimes they add a version
like 2.8 or B which however is often not reported).

Also, it depends on what you want a WiFi for and how much you
want to pay, and whether you need 11 or 54 mpbs connectivity.
Note also that most of the adapters require a firmware file, and
since that is proprietary, it usually has to be downloaded and
installed by hand (even if for Fedora 4 there are some
unofficial RPMs with firmware on the usual alternative sites).

So it is not quite as simple as ''just work''.

But fortunately I have written a guide with pointers here:

  http://WWW.sabi.co.UK/Notes/linuxWiFi.html

In particular look at the "Well known drivers and their
chipsets" section.

For my laptop I have a ZyDAS 1201 USB 802.11b stick that I
bought for around £18 from eBuyer, and its driver, which has
become pretty reliable since ZyDAS released the chip specs, is
now part of the base kernel as of 2.6.12, and for me it just
works.

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