I've tried looking at the Ubuntu community pages, but they seem a bit out of date. Of course, using a PC Card for WiFi is probably out of date as well. But I'm trying to resurrect an old laptop for use as a browser platform on trips. I have a Linksys Wireless B (WPC11 v4) but it's performance leaves everything to be desired, although the Broadcom driver works with it.

If there's some tabular data out there, that would be great. I don't really need hand-holding. But I'm getting buried by spurious results from Google.

I'll probably upgrade to XUbuntu (or LUbuntu) 12.04 LTS in a few months.

Thanks for your help.

There are many Wlan cards for PCMCIA available on This Newegg page.
I expect that the majority will work without hassles in Linux.

How old of a pcmcia slot is the issue. I doubt you can still find any 16 bit cards and maybe few 5V cards still.

I'd just get a usb to wireless instead.

Old systems running wireless may be too much for them if you use encryption. The act of checksum takes a lot of cpu time.


A wired connection may be the solution.

The linux community almost dropped pcmcia support when usb came out. Pcmcia support was never any good in laptops. Things like pcmcia slots behind pci to pci bridges and odd bios issues really make the whole deal stink. I'd never attempt to play with pcmcia in a modern distro today. It stunk 10 years ago and I forget it all.

I have a DLink DWL-AG660 PCMCIA adapter in my older Thinkpad that works fine with Linux though it lacks 802.11n capability (a/b/g only).