[NBLUG/talk] pccards

troy fryman at sonic.net
Tue Jan 20 18:23:00 PST 2004


On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 04:48:57PM -0800, Dustin Mollo wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 20, 2004 at 04:37:27PM -0800, Nat W wrote:
> > 
> > I recently came into possession of a Dell inspirion 2500.The laptop is
> > great except for one problem, it has no network support. But Itdoes have
> > two pc card slots. so I was wondering if Linux supported linksys802.11b
> > wireless cards, and how I would go about setting one up ( or where I
> > couldfind out). And if they are not supported another alternative for
> > hooking thislaptop up to a wireless or wired network.
> 
> i'd suggest finding the product you want to buy, then taking that model
> number to google and poke around and see what you can find.  i've found that
> so far as 802.11b is concerned, most cards just seem to work.  if the
> linksys card you're looking at is the wpc11, i found a poop-load of links on
> google talking about that card and linux and docs on how to make it work.

What sucks is that many 802.11x card mfg's (Linksys included) will
change chipsets and neglect to change the model number.  So, you'll find
older WPC11 cards with the Prism2.x chipset work great while newer
versions of the same card use a RealTek chipset which has limited
support.  There an open source RealTek driver which I hear doesn't work
so well.  There's also a proprietary RealTek  which I hear doesn't work
so well.  I don't believe that in most cases there's any way to tell
what's inside, but there's been a lot of discussion on this, so maybe
google knows.

A tangent to this discussion... For anyone else that thinks the wlan-ng
drivers are "poopy", try the hostap drivers.  They install in like
1/1000th of the time it takes to get wlan-ng working, and they're now
well supported in Kismet ( a reason many folk went with wlan-ng in the
first place )

-troy




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