naath now has a Dell Latitude CPt C400GT. I installed Debian etch on it and it pretty much just worked. Currently it only has wired Ethernet, so we want a PCMCIA wireless card. Any recommendations? Ideally with free Linux drivers with WPA support.
Bah, what's wrong with wired Ethernet? In my days, we didn't have fancy-schmancy wireless Internet, beaming packets to every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the neighborhood, and we LIKED it that way!
Can't speak for Debian, but I've found that the Cisco Aironet cards work well under Ubuntu (and FreeBSD, for that matter), and best of all it appears that most flavours of Linux are actively supported (http://www.goonda.org/wireless/aironet/).
I like my built-in Intel ipw2200, supported out of the box. :-)
I have in front of me a cheap Edimax EW7108PCg (http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4MWH) PC card based on a Ralink chipset, which I used in the previous laptop. Experiment shows it to be supported out of the box on 2.6.22 using the mac80211/rt2x00/rt61pci module (provided appropriate firmware is present). Earlier kernels don't have this built in but it's available from rt2x00.serialmonkey.com (http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/).
When I got the card a couple of years ago I couldn't get WPA to work on the new rt2x00 driver but the "legacy" rt61 driver worked perfectly once I'd recompiled Fedora's kernel without the 4KSTACKS option. (It doesn't use wpa_supplicant but supports WPA-PSK via iwpriv settings.) It seems that things have improved since then.
I should add that my 2.6.22 is the current (as of last week) Fedora Core 6 kernel, because it turns out that the mac80211 wireless drivers aren't in the vanilla kernel and have been brought in from the wireless-dev git tree (http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/linville/wireless-dev.git) as one of Fedora's kernel patches.
Out of curiosity what are USB ones like, does anyone know? Nearly went that route with my PC when having trouble finding a low-profile one. They seem really common at the moment.
I have a Netgear USB WG111v2 which I got free with a box of cerealwireless router. It seems to work, and the Linux drivers are Free, but: before 2.6.incredibly-recent they're not in the Linus tree so it's either painful integration or hope your distro has done it (Ubuntu probably has, haven't tested).
The main issue I found was that it's a bit awkward having a big USB dongle hanging off the side of the laptop. Oh, and it didn't seem so good with weak signals as either my Nokia N800 or the Intel wireless chipset in my new laptop (smaller aerial, I guess).
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-15 08:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-15 08:45 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-15 11:38 pm (UTC)I have in front of me a cheap Edimax EW7108PCg (http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=4MWH) PC card based on a Ralink chipset, which I used in the previous laptop. Experiment shows it to be supported out of the box on 2.6.22 using the mac80211/rt2x00/rt61pci module (provided appropriate firmware is present). Earlier kernels don't have this built in but it's available from rt2x00.serialmonkey.com (http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/).
When I got the card a couple of years ago I couldn't get WPA to work on the new rt2x00 driver but the "legacy" rt61 driver worked perfectly once I'd recompiled Fedora's kernel without the 4KSTACKS option. (It doesn't use wpa_supplicant but supports WPA-PSK via iwpriv settings.) It seems that things have improved since then.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-15 11:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-19 06:13 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-16 07:37 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-16 08:23 am (UTC)I have a Netgear USB WG111v2 which I got free with a
box of cerealwireless router. It seems to work, and the Linux drivers are Free, but: before 2.6.incredibly-recent they're not in the Linus tree so it's either painful integration or hope your distro has done it (Ubuntu probably has, haven't tested).The main issue I found was that it's a bit awkward having a big USB dongle hanging off the side of the laptop. Oh, and it didn't seem so good with weak signals as either my Nokia N800 or the Intel wireless chipset in my new laptop (smaller aerial, I guess).
(no subject)
Date: 2007-08-16 08:12 am (UTC)