[Gllug] Wifi that works with Ubuntu

[John G Walker]

On Wed, 02 Aug 2006 20:30:59 +0100 "M.Blackmore" <mblackmore at oxlug.org>
wrote:

> On Wed, 2006-08-02 at 17:25 +0100, Kendall, Peter (LRDG) wrote:
> > I've just loaded Ubuntu Dapper Drake onto an Advent laptop and am
> > trying to find a Wifi card that will work.
> > 
> > Are there known chipsets that I can quote to buy a card that Ubuntu
> > will recognise?  
> 
> Ralink write drivers, according to www.linuxemporium.co.uk, and they
> supply Belkin cards with known chipsets that have said drivers, so I
> got a pair from them for a pair of second user Dell 8200s I picked up
> last week. Arrived next day complete with driver disk, tho' I noticed
> that suse 10.1 recognised the cards as being there and installed
> drivers out of the box.
> 
> They want to encourage ralink to continue to do so - I've been meaning
> to send the companies (ralink and belkin) a little appreciative email
> saying thanks for being linux friendly, I bought your hardware
> specifically for that reason! If that would have any effect, but you
> never know, it might filter up to a decision level in the organisation
> if a few of us do so...
> 
> The fact I haven't got wireless working with suse yet is probably down
> to my incompetence and ignorance, 'cos the devices have been found,
> recognised, and had drivers installed, according to the hardware list.
> 
> I will have another go when the kids get to bed tonight if I'm still
> awake enough to fiddle with pooters.
> 
> Roll on start of school term!
> 
> Yours
> exhausted housedad


These Linux Emporium-supplied Belkin cards work okay with SuSE 10.0,
so they should work with 10.1. I had to do a bit of fiddling around in
YaST to get mine working to start with. I can't remember precisely what
I did, but I think I had to change something in the hardware config. I
suspect that I needed to do this as a result of installing the card in
an already-loaded machine since, when I did a clean reinstall (due to an
entirely different error on my part), the card worked perfectly with no
action needed on my part.

BTW when I spoke to Linux Emporium about the cards I was told that not
all these Belkin cards use a Linux-friendly chipset. So you can't just
pop down to PC World to get the same card and expect it to work. So
maybe an email to Belkin to encourage them to be consistently
Linux-friendly is in order

-- 
 All the best,
 John
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