Wireless hardware buying advice?

sprefd · 10-30-2008, 11:44 PM

So I'm looking to set up a home wireless network. I don't know much about wireless (which is WHY I want to do this), and all I can't seem to make head or tail of wireless support on Linux.

I've currently got a headless Pentium III box (Gentoo) on routing/masquerading duty, and I'd like to give it the ability to serve as a wireless router as well...preferably with a PCI card.

I've also got a Pentium IV Dell laptop dual-booting Windows XP and Debian (formerly Gentoo) which could use a wireless PCMCIA card.

I'd like to get my hands dirty learning whatever I can about wireless networking (packet sniffing, crypto, the whole nine yards), but I'd prefer not to spend money on something that isn't going to work. In short, I'd like to buy something relatively "easy" to install, known to work well with Linux, and pretty capable. What would you recommend?

farslayer · 10-31-2008, 05:01 PM

I have the Asus WL-107G PCMCIA card for my laptop it uses the ralink rt2500 chipset and took undert 5 minutes to setup and configure.. I'd call that easy.

Go for hardware with 100% free drivers it will be much easier to get working in Linux.
http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/net/wireless/cards.html