There are several mini pci cards availiable (ebay is you best friend) either new -old stock or pulls from upgrades etc. Basicaly there are major types of cards, based on the chipset they are using with varying linux support
1) Prism2 based cards IMHO They are the best choice for 802.11b mainly due to functionality and linux driver stability support. The driver (hostap) supports all 3 modes ap,client and ad-hock, wep, power control (through a patch) and recently WPA I have been using Prism2/hostap for sometime now for long range (1 to 4km) links with great success and little troubles The bad thing is that Prism2 cards are no longer produced (or are about to stop beeing produced) and most companies switch to other alternatives The new Prism 3 cards are a different "beast", stay away if you can 2) Orinoco/Agere cards VERY good radio, but unfortunately no support for AP mode (or to be more exact very limited support, requires a a different driver,need to flash the card with new firmware, not sure if it's supported anymore). Some of the Agere cards, need a patch for the driver to work Easy to find on Ebay (<20$) If you are looking for a client only solution (no ap) it's a good option 3) Intel based cards (802.11 b/g) The linux driver is under development, part is binary only (the HAL) Intel was one for the first to use a "soft MAC controller" and this is a reason why part of the driver is binary (i.e part of the firmware is handled by the pc directly, similar to winmodems)I would not recomend them (for the time) for production work, as driver has several bugs 4) Atheros based cards (802.11 a/b/g) Also "soft mac", part of the driver (madwifi) is binary but at a much better shape than intel's Also supports AP mode (ad hock is broken) and a very good alternative to hostap The only availiabe solution for a/g AP's in linux 5) linksys WRT54G/ broadcom Well it's a low cost alternative to a pc based AP but the broadcom radio part is not that good (in terms of sensitivity) Other than that looks like a good little (and cheap ;-) unit to use Recently got about 100 units to be deployed for our community network (Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network) for about 90Euro/pc I am working on updating the wifi support for Bering (got the new hostap drives compiled, working on the madwifi, intel next if time permits) and possible adding some documentation also. I will post them as soon as i am done as the wireless tools need also updating Stelios ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by BEA Weblogic Workshop FREE Java Enterprise J2EE developer tools! Get your free copy of BEA WebLogic Workshop 8.1 today. http://ads.osdn.com/?ad_id=4721&alloc_id=10040&op=click _______________________________________________ leaf-devel mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/leaf-devel
