On 18 Feb 2007, at 23:19, Mick wrote:
... I am trying to
find out which WiFi cardbus to buy for my laptop. I didn't have
much joy
with a Belkin and would like to get a card which has a chipset that is
supported well in Linux.
Which chipsets have the more mature drivers?
You don't state which model of Belkin you tried, but I can assure you
that they do a "set" (USB, cardbus, PCI) of 802.11g cards that are
excellently supported by the rt2500 drivers. These are excellent, are
OSS & you can get them with `emerge rt2500`.
I've also used cards which use the prism54 & madwifi drivers, which
both do "master mode" (for building a wireless access point or base-
station under Linux) and are both excellent. Jean Tourrilhes' page at
HP.com is quite up-to-date on the situation with the prism54 drivers,
I think, and I've never seen a cardbus card using this chipset,
anyway, but if you can get hold of a card that's well supported by
prism54 then it's very easy to use and the driver is in the main
kernel tree.
The Atheros chipset supported by madwifi is capable of doing 802.11a
as well as b & g - not all cards do "a", but they're not too
difficult to find. madwifi-ng is a little non-standard in the way you
configure the card (so I guess it might not work so well with
graphical wireless configuration utilities) but it offers some more
advanced features (VAPs, or "virtual access-points" in master-mode,
for instance, allow you to have WEP & unencrypted interfaces on the
same card; hence with iptables you can set different firewall rules
for ath0 & ath1).
<http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hardware>
<http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility>
<http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/
Linux.Wireless.drivers.802.11ag.html#Prism54>
I recommend this card, but if you're outside the UK contact in
advance regarding shipping:
<http://networkned.co.uk/Belkin_Cardbus.php>
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am involved with this supplier.
Stroller.
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