[Nottingham] Re: wireless card which works with linux?

[A. Devin Giddings]

On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 09:22:15AM +0000, John Cremona wrote:
> Thanks for the replies so far.  For the exact reasons which Martin
> Garton gives, I really wanted to know of one for which there is a
> linux driver (which works with a 2.6 kernel).
> 
> Also, how can one tell what chipset a given card has (not from the
> outside of the box in a shop certainly!)?   There are stories of
> manufacturers (Linksys) changing chip without changing the model
> number, so this must be easy to get wrong.

In my experience the answer is "with difficulty".
If it hasn't already been mentioned yet, this site has a list of
cards and the drivers, as well as many other useful links:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/

I've found that prism2/2.5 based cards with the hostap driver work well,
and you can do some cool stuff with them in access point mode.
Here is a list of cards based on this chipset:
http://www.kismetwireless.net/cards.shtml

Watch out for the newer cards based on the prism3 chipset. They need to
have the firmware loaded every time you use them. Although this can be
done with the prism2_srec utility, which is part of the hostap utilities,
it is an unwanted complication.

Regards,

Devin.
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