[SWLUG] WiFi & Linux

[Gerald Davies]

On 21/05/07, Phillip Evans <phillip at paevans.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
>
> Instinct tells me that a pci adaptor card is probably less bother than a
> usb adaptor - is this fair comment ?
>

Depends.  This card (Well, the one I bought):

http://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Peripherals/Network+Products/Adapter/Wireless-G+%2854Mbps%29/+Linksys+Wmp55ag+Dual+Band?productId=22078

works out of the box with Ubuntu (currently using wext driver & WPA-PSK)

However, this card:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?LIN-WMP54G

which is based on ralink rt61, worked out of the box with WPA-PSK, but
was buggy as hell.  I've since installed the latest Beta drivers
(http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com) and written some really rather
horrible script to bring up the NIC and get it to work (even DHCP
seems flakey in conjunction with my router, so I'm giving it a fixed
IP/DNS/Route atm).  I'd much prefer to have it running properly with
wpa_supplicant, etc.  Perhaps I should spend some time working on it
;)

I also have:

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?F5D7050UK

which appears to get recognised and works without encryption, but i've
not invested any time to get it to work with WPA-PSK since I prefer
PCI-based cards, and besides, it came with a router I bought.
However, I was kind of impressed that a USB NIC was recognised without
any effort.  I'm guessing it works with WEP, but no idea about WPA.

Also have a 3com 802.11b PCI Card that works out of the box with most
distros (used to use FreeBSD (gasp! I'm sorry) with it).

Also, a host of PCMCIA cards (based on Orinoco Gold Cards (Hermes
IIRC) - they were great years ago for laptops & airsnort type
applications).

I guess it depends what you want - WEP or WPA (I'd go for WPA in some
capacity), but if you went for WEP and MAC Filtering, you could always
buy a cheap bridge (I have a Buffalo one - only for WEP though) and
forget about most of your WIFI issues.

I could go on and on and on...I've gone through ridiculous amounts of
WIFI hardware.  I think as someone previously mentioned - you always
need to check the chipsets.

I do apologise for my rambling.