Just moved house (rental) and the only phoneline is a mile away (its a big hosue) from my office. Ive already got a wireless access point that ive used for a long while without issue with my laptop, thinking however its easier to get a wifi card for my desktop than attempt to run leads through the house.

Just looking to see if there are any cards around that I should really avoid or if anyone has any recommendations on cards that are easily compatible.

I' no stranger to compiling my own kernel and I'm currently running a 2.6.18 patched for openVZ.

I'm more interested in hearing stories of cards that should be avoided more than anything, though any recommendations would also be nice. Thanks.

I've had nothing but success with Atheros chipset based wireless cards. I have one for Slackware 12 where I downloaded, compiled and installed the madwifi kernel module and wpasupplicant and connected to my wpa network in an evening. Last weekend I installed xubuntu on a laptop with another Atheros card, and it picked it up out of the box and I managed to connect to the WEP "secured" network available in a matter of minutes. So my vote is to go for an Atheros chipset, they're the most friendly in my experience.

What I would never touch again, even with a ten foot bargepole, is a Broadcom chipset; they will only work with nsdiswrapper (unless you're very lucky at getting the open source kernel module to work) and are generally a pain in the rear end.

To summarise: Atheros good; Broadcom bad.

Atheros, Intel WiFi 3945, Intel WiFi 4945 are the ones you should search for. Any WiFi NIC that have to use ndiswrapper to work are the ones you should avoid.

Wired network is a lot more reliable and more stable than a Wireless network. For desktops, I recommend use a wired network and then use wireless for mobile devices like notebooks.

IMHO, it is easier to setup a wired network than troubleshooting a wireless network.

TIP:
Use closets to cover up holes for Ethernet cable.