I was amazed at this product. I agonized over the selection of a wireless card because of many many reported problems and finally took the plunge with the netgear MA401
I purchased 2, one for me and one for my SO, the plan was to install one on her laptop (windows 98) and have it working...once I knew the card worked, I would then take that one and settle in for an afternoon of tinkering to get it to work on MY laptop. (Note: No instructions or linux support was provided by netgear with this card).
The windows install was a breeze, requiring a few minutes and a reboot with the CD install. I was pleased.
I was even MORE pleased when the linux install was even EASIER!!
I pulled out my ethernet card and put in my netgear card and restarted the pcmcia system...that's literally all it took. I had network and net access. However for some reason ifconfig and lsmod still seemed to register my 3com (I didn't see orinocco_ps anywhere...but on the next reboot...all was normal). From there I was able to install the wireless tools package easily. I was even able to use the patched orinocco drivers to use Kismet. (Note, urpmi got me the wireless tools package and the orinocco drivers were included...I didn't download anything at that point except the patched drivers for Kismet later on).
I should note that my kernel isn't stock. I had recompiled it a week before and KNOWING I would get a wireless card, I made sure all the wireless kernel options were enabled. I don't think this is the case for a standard mandrake kernel since on my gf's laptop (also Mandrake 9.1) I wasn't able to get it working quite as easily (and she ended up wiping her drive before I could recompile the kernel...so...).
Last week, I've played around to test my DVDROM and booted my laptop with Knoppix 3.2 and to my pleasant surprise, it detected the netgear and loaded the correct drivers...I had to supply the correct info (session ID, key) to get online, but that wasn't hard.
I have to say that this is a great little card. I have a medium sized apartment with solid cement walls and I've been able to go anywhere with it and I get a solid connection with no interference (about 50 ft away at the furthest...but at work I'm 100ft away and I can get a strong signal from the AP). It was cheap and so far its definitely giving MORE value than I paid for...I *HIGHLY* recommend it.
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: $84.00 | Rating: 10
Kernel (uname -r):
2.4.22
Distribution:
Slackware 9.1
Awesome little card. Very compatible and very smart design - the antenna is as slim as the card so it plays nice with my Linksys pcm100 10/100 ethernet card (rj-45 jack built-in) which is a bit fat. Can't say that about the WPC11.
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: $20.00 | Rating: 10
Kernel (uname -r):
2.4.22 - 2.4.24
Distribution:
Slackware 9.1
I picked this card up for a whopping $20 bucks and suprised how easy it was to setup. Slackware detected using hotplug, loaded module and all I had to do was set the iwconfig for the wireless connection.
Probably one of the easiest out of the box wireless cards out there to configure. Easier to setup in Linux than even Windows.
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: $20.00 | Rating: 10
Kernel (uname -r):
2.4.22
Distribution:
Mandrake 9.2
This is quite an excellent card! Had a little problem using it with a Slack based distro, but got it working in no time. Worked perfectly without any configuring on RH 9 and Mandrake 9.2. Probably the easiest and best out-of-the-box card I know ;^)
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: $30.00 | Rating: 10
Kernel (uname -r):
2.4.24-xfs
Distribution:
Knoppix v3.3
Full support, Knoppix detects it from bootup. Only snag I've ever hit is if you use it for an extended about of time (6 hours or more) it might overheat and stop functioning. Only solution is to let it cool off for 30 minutes or so.
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: $55.00 | Rating: 10
Kernel (uname -r):
2.4.19-4GB
Distribution:
SuSE 8.1
The only thing wrong with this card is that it's discontinued and can be hard to find. I got mine from someone on e-bay. As soon as I plugged it in and typed in a few configuration parameters, it worked -- no compiling drivers, no fooling with wrappers. I'm happy!
And as tcaptain said, the Linux installation was actually much easier than the Windoze installation. That's a nice change!
Would you recommend the product? yes | Price you paid?: $40.00 | Rating: 9
Kernel (uname -r):
2.6.11-1286
Distribution:
Fedora Core 4, Test 3
Zero config with Fedora. Shows up as Intersil Prism 2.5.
It may be my card, however the signal strength isn't as strong as with other wireless cards. Sometimes with Windows, this causes connections not to be made.
Overall, though, this card has enabled me (finally) to use Linux on my laptop.
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