which wireless PCMCIA card works well ....and....

goanuj

which one works best w/ Gentoo? [least amount of work to get working properly, reconfiguring kernel, mucking around w/ modules, etc. ]

I am deciding between these 3.

Orinoco Silver 11Mb
D-Link DWL-650 Wireless
NetGear MA401 802.11B

The main reason I put the Orinoco Silver is because it has the external antenna option. Also, I know that these cards suck a lot of power out of the battery of a laptop. Does anyone know where I could find a comparison of actual power drawn for PCMCIA cards (over 1 to 2 hour usage) besides looking at the manufacturer specs (which are too optimistic).

qwkbrnfox · Posted: Wed Mar 26, 2003 3:13 am Post subject:

I have an Orinoco gold that been great for me! I can't give figures about power consumption, but I don't really notice a huge difference. I found that install was pretty easy. I haven't used the external antenna connection, but it's a good option to have.

Valorin · n00b Joined: 22 Jan 2003 Posts: 12

I got my MA401 working without any major problems (although after quite a few attempts I might add). There's a post on these forums which helped my infinitely, (do a search for messages posted by me: 'valorin') and it worked like a charm after toiling for a long time to get it working. I hope this helps a little.

goanuj · Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2003 12:10 am Post subject: re: orinoco gold

do you know what the major differences between the orinoco gold and orinoco silver are?

qwkbrnfox · Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2003 12:25 am Post subject:

The gold support WEP (wireless encryption) with 128 bits, while the silver supports 40 bits (I think!). However, it appears that the silver is upgradable to 128 with a little trick. Check out this website. Note that WEP isn't a great protocol, though, and moving to 128 bits doesn't get you foolproof protection.

goanuj · Posted: Thu Mar 27, 2003 7:19 pm Post subject: receiving silver orinoco soon

well I am going to receive a silver orinoco card soon

goanuj · Posted: Thu Apr 03, 2003 10:21 pm Post subject: cool

cool I finally recv'd the silver orinoco card, now I need to get my butt moving on howto install gentoo on my thinkpad 240x (doesn't have a bootable cd drive)

SIGH! still have not been able to install gentoo on my thinkpad 240x (and it is such a cute little computer!) however, I do have the orinoco card and I am trying to get Toms Root Boot disk to detect it.

I think I will have to

0. get the orinoco_cs.o file
1. change the /etc/pcmcia/config
2. /etc/rc.pcmcia stop
3. /etc/rc.pcmcia start

anyone see anything wrong with this?

bkjoegold · n00b Joined: 11 Oct 2002 Posts: 14 Location: New York

I know it is REALLY expensive in comparison to other cards on the market but the Cisco Aironet PCMCIA card is great. I have found that it works at almost twice the distance from the AP as the Linksys cards.

It comes with Linux drivers on the CD from Cisco, so I feel good about supporting a product that ships with Linux drivers. Plus my company bought the card for me (although I would buy one).

It does everything that I have needed it to do with no troubles.