What Wireless Card should I get

[nobleclem]

I need to purchase a wirless PCI or USB network adapter for my desktop... I plan to put Gentoo on it in the near future so any recommendations... by what I see neither d-link nor linksys provide linux drivers for it... I would prefer to stick also with one of those brands... Unless someone has a good reason why I should use a different one...

Well Thanks for any input.

[paranode]

I can't say for PCI or USB because I have a PCMCIA one. But even though the companies may not have linux drivers most of their cards are supported by linux-wlan-ng and some other drivers. Plus since they are so widely used, finding support on the forums is usually pretty easy. But you should find out which model you want and then search the forum for that model and see if anyone else has it working.
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Meh.

[tdb]

Don't be so concerned with card manufacturer. What you are looking for is the chipset used to drive the radio. You have to make sure you get the right one, as some are very good, open-sourced and well-supported, some have binary, closed-source drivers that may or may not work, and others aren't even supported at all.

Do some research and get something with an Orinoco or Prism 2 or 5 chipset. These are older chipsets that are well supported and full of features. Linux can do more with them then windows can. These are ususally found in higher-end cards. Atmel is a new chipset for lower-end cards. They have linux drivers, but aren't as fully capable. (they can do all the stuff they can do in windows) Atmel released their drivers under the GPL, and there is a sourceforge project for their support, but they are screwy and the support is lacking. These can usually be found in cards that have a "+" after their model number. Texas Inst. has a new low end chip where they promised to release binary closed-source drivers. I don't know if they have yet. These chips also tend to be found in cards that have a "+" after their model number.

Bottom line, depends on what you want to use it for. If you are good with linux and compiling drivers, and only want basic wireless access, then you have more options. If you don't want to have a hassle getting them to work, or you want to go wardriving and really use the card's full potential, then spend the extra money and get an orinoco or prism card.

This site is your friend:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/

[kpoman]

Hello,

I bought 2 netgear MA101 (which are usb atmel based wifi 802.11b cards).
Had to compile the gpl atmel drivers, found at http://atmelwlandriver.sourceforge.net if I recall well .

There is a little trick here, try to BUY Netgear MA101 REVISION B ! because drivers for rev.A are being discontinued

Also point that I had random disconnections with kernels 2.4.19 and this drivers. I wen to 2.4.20 and everything works fine .

I have both, MA101 rev.a and MA101 rev.b, both work good;

I had to uninstall hotplug, because I had kernel panics when rebooting the computer (not happening if I unplugged the card and replugged it).

It is not very very fast though, I use to have about 400kBytes/second maximal datarate . But it works fine so I'm happy

[tdb]

Yeah, I have the Belkin Wireless network notebook card F5D6020 ver.2, which has the Atmel chip in it. atmelwlandriver is ok, no one seems to really be dedicated to it. But it will get the card working, though. I had the driver working with the 2.4.19 gentoo sources, with full wireless extensions. But I can't get it to take to a 2.4.20 kernel. Keep getting the "cardservices release does not match." I solved that problem before, but don't remember what I did to do it. Anyway. The claim they're cleaning up the code to prepare for inclusion in the kernel. I think they should merge it in with the linux-wlan-ng project, or pcmcia-cs.

[relyt]

Believe it or not, but Microsoft's USB wireless adapter is very good with the linux-wlan-ng drivers. Mainly because they include the newest PRISM firmware, unlike some other vendors... *cough*linksys*cough*

[reaz82]