Wireless

[ewx]

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.

Comments

[imc.livejournal.com]

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.

[imc.livejournal.com]

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.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

I've suggested that Naath get one of the Edimax cards.