WLAN card recommendation for Desktop?

[raluke]

Can somebody recommend a PCI WLAN card that works particularly well --- i.e., easy setup --- on his Gentoo desktop box? I'm in the middle of sanding and repainting my basement, which has forced me to move my computers upstairs away from my cable modem/hub/WLAN access point to avoid the dust and dirt. I've been cut off from my beautiful Gentoo Linux box for the past week. My WinXP laptop isn't enough, psychologically speaking, and Linux withdrawal pains are getting bad...

I'm using an A7V8X main board with AMD Athlon-XP 2600+ in case that makes any difference. Also running 2.6.0 development kernel.

Thanks mucho in advance,
-Robert

[UberLord]

I have netgear wg311, using the madwifi-drivers in gentoo. It's not as reliable in terms of signal power compared to my SMC Prism2 pcmcia card, but that maybe a driver problem as it's still pre alpha code.

Configuration using my configuration and startup scripts should be easy

[raluke]

I'm actually still considering doing this, even though it's no longer "necessary". Here's a logistical question though: Is there a way download needed packages/drivers on a different computer, burn them to CD, and then emerge them on the Gentoo box from the CD reader? Based on the other postings here and on usenet, it looks like I'll be experimenting for a while before getting it right.

TIA,
-Robert

P.S. FWIW, my short survey of usenet using Google leads me to think that the easiest (cough) way of getting WLAN to work with Linux is to use Gentoo! I read lots of complaints and no real solutions posted by users of SuSE, Fedora, Mandrake, etc. Comments?

[raluke]

I've also been thinking of wiping my hard drive and installing from the 2004.0 Gentoo CD. Does anybody know if that LiveCD has all the wireless LAN drivers on the iso that are otherwise available in portage?

Thanx again,
-Robert