Wireless NIC card that supports LINUX drivers.

techtom

Hi
I am looking to buy a wireless nic (PCI) for my computer that runs SUSE LINUX 8.2. Has any one got one up and working on their linux machine.

Help please.

wind00ze

hi ,
It all depends on the chipset of the card. Linux has the best support for Atheros and Prism2 cards. For a pci card i would recommend a D-Link G520 which has an atheros chipset.Ive had it working on a number of Linux distros including SuSe 10 with no problems what so ever.

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=12

bminish

wind00ze wrote:

hi ,
It all depends on the chipset of the card. Linux has the best support for Atheros and Prism2 cards. For a pci card i would recommend a D-Link G520 which has an atheros chipset.Ive had it working on a number of Linux distros including SuSe 10 with no problems what so ever.

http://www.dlink.com/products/?pid=12

Atheros cards work well BUT the drivers depend on a non open source HAL supplied by atheros. They are good cards though

Prism cards and orinco (lucent) cards have fully open source drivers and in many cases you might find that your kernel already includes drivers for these.

It if was me and my Money I would get an atheros based card then get the madwifi-old drivers from http://madwifi.org/ and compile them. the reason I suggest the old drivers is tha they are stable and a damn sight easier to use than the new code.

This
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/
web page may be helpful and even if you don't use gentoo it's worth looking at their howtos
http://www.gentoo.org/
but don't forget that Gentoo users are Rice boys
http://funroll-loops.org

techtom

Ok guys I bought a dwl-G520.

How do i get the drivers/source to compile.

Is there a step by step guide anywhere on thenet.

bminish

techtom wrote:

Ok guys I bought a dwl-G520.

How do i get the drivers/source to compile.

Is there a step by step guide anywhere on thenet.

Sigh!
see links above
it's the madwifi drivers you will need

techtom

Is there binaries that I can down load ...
that will make this driver work
I dont want to compile anything.

bminish

techtom wrote:

Is there binaries that I can down load ...
that will make this driver work
I dont want to compile anything.

It's a Kernel driver you will have to compile it unless your distro has already got a built module, considering the non GPL status of part of the driver this is unlikely.

What's the big deal about compiling ?

.brendan

daveharlowe

techtom wrote:

Is there binaries that I can down load ...
that will make this driver work
I dont want to compile anything.

Hi,

My advice is to
1) Install ubuntu Linux 5.10 (this is debian based) onto your PC.
2) Do what Marlow outlines here to load the driver:
http://www.marlow.dk/site.php/tech/madwifi

Repository
My repository for the Debian packages can be used by adding: 
  deb ftp://debian.marlow.dk/ sid madwifi
  deb-src ftp://debian.marlow.dk/ sid madwifi
		To /etc/apt/sources.list and of course to run apt-get update afterwards.

Then run this:
apt-get install madwifi-source madwifi-tools.

My repository only holds the x86 platform based -tools packages, so for any other platform you should choose the package builder.

Give us a shout on IRC if you need more details:

Application: www.mirc.com
Server :irc.irishwan.com
Channel : #limerickwan

regards,
Dave

philologos

use ndiswrapper

irlrobins

buy a wireless ethernet bridge. No drivers needed then. Linksys have one

murphaph

Just incase anyone is looking through this in future, I set up a Linux firewall & wireless router a few years ago and it very rarely crashes and I've never had any poxy worms or anything get to my XP machines. I don't even have any anti-virus and have never had a problem. Anyway, I run RedHat 7.0 with a Buffalo PCMCIA card in cradle in the PCI slot. It was all that was readily available at the time and (afaik) uses an orinocco (Lucent) chipset. It worked without compiling even back then.

I'm sure the newer distros have much better support for all the card features but it does everything I ever wanted it to do.