It worked, but was a pain to get running each time

Linksys refuses to provide drivers for Linux (I have the email) so you need to install ndiswrapper. In order for that to be done you need to recompile the kernel-source. Maybe its just me, but I refuse to spend money on a company who refuses to embrace linux and leaves the headaches up to the end user.

Put the card in, loaded the driver with ndiswrapper, activated wlan and set the essid, and it was up and running. took me about 10 minutes and i was online.

It does work with ndiswrapper and and kernel support, but never saw the speed going over 600KB/s although the cards and AP run in 802.11g.

The reason why I bought these cards was the cheap price, some guy sold 3 of these to me for really cheap.

Only problem left I have is that one of the cards has a different PCI ID and brings up an error when loading ndiswrapper.

Instead of 14E4:4320 (as it should be) it's detected as 14E4:4306.

The card looks exactly the same as the others in design, yet the board seems to have a different colour, might have been a dodgy batch they made.

Works great with ndiswrapper, I even have WPA encryption using wpa_supplicant.

Works perfectly using either Ndiswrapper .011 or Driverloader. Also for some odd reason people seem to think there are no linux drivers for this card, but Broadcom has had Linux driver since early this year. Just check out their site. They wouldn't compile for me, so I never had the chance to see if they actually worked better or not.

Was not an easy install however worked with ndiswrapper. I think that linksys is working on making linux drivers for some of its wireless cards. Might be worth checking for one.

BEWARE, there are 2 versions available of this card. There is a version 2 and a version 4.
Version 4 at the present time DOES NOT support WPA. I have not found a way to determine from the exterior packaging which is version 2 and which is version 4. ( maybe by the mac or serial no??). Physically version 4 is more streamlined and version 2 looks like a pcmcia card attached to a circuit board.
From what I gather version 2 does support WPA, according to this post on broadband reports: http://www.broadbandreports.com/forum/remark,11771353~mode=flat

If you haven't guessed yet my opinion is slightly biased because of the non WPA support, and having spent 2 months tinkering with different options only to find out the driver did not support it. How can the older card support more features than the newer one??? (Bad linksys, Bad) I do not know what chipset Version 2 has, but for version 4 it is the ralink 2500.

There is a project on sourceforge developing a driver that can be compiled for the ralink 2500. It is still pretty new, so I am hoping soon there will be a solution.

BTW, I was using the linuxant driverloader with the original cd drivers.

I got this card installed OK eventually with ndiswrapper. I have even managed to get WPA working with it :).
My only problem with it is that when it is connected my system slows down a lot :-S.

All you need to do is download the rt2x00 driver (rt2500 for v4 rt2400 for v2 unless your card has a broadcom chipset) from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/ and compile and install it. To get it working on my box, I just added the line "modprobe rt2500" somewhere in the init tree. It comes with a dandy GUI config interface so all you need to do is load the drivers and run an dhcp config tool. I had to do other stuff (like change the mac address and force a new IP address) due to my network's setup, but that wasn't a card related problem.

I had plenty of trouble getting this to work, but I did end up getting it to work with no problems. Most of my problems were because I am brand-spanking-new to linux, and were related to installing the different programs. If anyone running mandrake 10.1 is having trouble, you might check out my post

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&threadid=312196&perpage=15&pagenumber=1

Good luck,

SSgtT

Put the card in. Mandrake detected it in the Configure Your Computer area, set it up using ndiswrapper (got the .inf off the supplied CDROM). Works fine. Haven't tested it in Windows yet. I used it as a replacement for my D-Link DWL-G520+ which isn't very compatible with kernel 2.6 (and because the card was on special offer down at PC World).

I have version 4 running. I installed it using the rt2500 drivers from rt2x00.sourceforge.net and I get a constant 54.Mbs connection. I have a simple script to configure interface at startup. I never even tried the ndiswrapper.
I am very happy with this card and would recommend it to anyone who is not afraid to get their hands dirty - its a bit of a struggle, but the payoff is a quality card.

What a nightmare! Took me 3 days to get it working, but this is also my first debain install, and my first wifi install. I will skip past all the errors i made and skip to what worked:

Used aptitude and downloaded/installed:
ndiswrapper-utils 1.1-4
ndiswrapper-modules-2.6.8-2-386 (use your kernel version of course)

then followed instructions on:
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/phpwiki/index.php/Installation

Now, this is what really got me confused: the card will not light up until it is connected to an AP. Even when doing the initial

# iwlist wlan0 scan

the lights stay dead. It's such a stupid thing but i thought the card wasn't working and this led me to try all sorts of things that didn't work. if it doesn't pick up any access points try moving it closer to the router, and making sure the router is set to AP if using aftermarket firmware. well at least i can laugh about it now.

** edit 2005-07-14 **

Wanted to add now that I've had it for a few days that you can have the rt2500 driver and ndiswrapper on the same system. Installed the rt2500 driver from source and using modprobe to switch between the two.
Also Kismet will not work with ndiswrapper. However even with the rt2500 driver it seems to not pick up as many APs compared to when scanning with iwlist.
Finally reception is poor due to antenna location. The cables on the back of the case cause interferance, and the fact that it's facing a wall with computer in front sure doesn't help. Of course this is true of all pci cards with built in antennae. I will need to use a larger, more movable antenna for my purposes... several hundred feet with walls and bushes in the way.

First of all I must say that the card with the broadcom chipset works with Ndiswrapper. Configuring is not difficult if you follow the ndiswrapper wiki.
However I am not happy with the card, and now after 1 year of tweaking I am looking to replace the card..........

Previously I used Mandrake 10 and 10.1 and had issues with the card.
Currently I am using Ubuntu, and I still have problems to get this to work 100%

I have also gone through almost every revision of the ndiswrapper up to 1.2.

Mandrake
It now and then refused to get an IP adress from my router. With a fixed IP adress things did not get much better. Only solution was to reset my router. The router was OK though and had no problem handling my laptop, or my wifes XP box.

Ubuntu
Occasionaly when starting the card does not get started. It gets listed with lspci, ndiswrapper has found hardware and driver and it is loaded in the kernel but refuses to find any active networks (iwlist) gives no output. It is like it has tuned off its reciever. Worse is that sometimes when you try ifup, ifconfig xxxxx, iwconfig or similar the computer freezes and the only way is to reboot using the power switch.

Once the card is up and running, it runs 100% and you can surf for hours, download a Gigabyte or two works without any problems...

Needs NDISWRAPPER (included in the distro) to get it to work but worked first time with a D-LINK wireless router
I've posted in the forums how to get it working. You simply copy the windows drivers to an accessible directory, load via ndiswrapper and ensure the ndiswrapper module is loaded on boot --nothing complicated.


(SUSE 10 betas 3, and 4 also work with NDISWRAPPER but these are Betas and shouldn't be used as your real running systems)

Cheers

-K

WMP54G v4 works with and without WPA-PSK encryption on Suse 9.3 Pro with a native rt2500 driver (so neither Windows drivers nor NDISWRAPPER are required) but not with the rt2500 driver provided in the distribution. You need to download and install the latest stable rt2500 driver and configuration utility from the rt2x00 Open Source Project at rt2x00.serialmonkey.com (release 1.1.0-b3 worked for me); follow the instructions in the README file. Use an ASCII passphrase w/o spaces and don't forget to reboot after setting up everything.

details in this thread: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?s=&postid=1902325#post1902325

Same as Troodon: native rt2500 driver works here, no disconnection, great speed. I did not test the ndiswrapper thing.

++

After ages of mucking about I found this:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/RalinkRT61?highlight=%28WifiDocs%2FDriver%29

it has instructions on using the official realtek driver

Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4320] (rev 02)

This Linksys PCI card is a pain to use in Linux. Needs b43legacy driver PLUS hard-to-find firmware file. Current 2008 Ubuntu does not fully support automatically. Puppy Linux 4.1.2 does have full auto support built-in.

Full how-to details here:
http://wiki.linuxquestions.org/wiki/WMP54G_Wireless_how-to_for_Ubuntu_8.10
Linksys WMP54G Wireless how-to for Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex

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