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

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

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!

[burkesworks.livejournal.com]

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/).

[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.

[lnr]

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.

[mstevens.livejournal.com]

I had good results with the cisco aironet cards when I was doing this, I think it was pre-WPA though so I don't know about support for that.