Are wireless networking cards all fully supported under Linux yet, or do they require a lot of naffing about to get them to work..

I'm specifically thinking about the Linksys WMP54G, but general info is good too..

http://www.comet.co.uk/comet/html/cache/495_117439.html

Thanks people

James

I found it difficult to get it working at first, but I bet your card is supported, check this out: http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Wireless-HOWTO.html

It also seems to depend on your distro... If your card is not directly supported, you can give ndiswrapper or LinuxAnt a go in order to load up WinXP drivers.

I found it impossible to get my Linksys card (very similar to yours) working. Ndiswrapper did everything *except* the security password for WEP. And without WEP, I won't bother with wireless. My wife's XP laptop works fine, and the router has 4 ethernet jacks, so I just ran a wire to my desktop.

I set up a wireless LAN a few months ago, and I found that WiFi support in Linux is somplace between "lousy" and "not that great." For example, if you want a PCI card with open source drivers and good encryption support, then you will probably have some problems. On the other hand, if you need a PCMCIA card, don't mind using the Windows drivers with NDIS, and don't care about encryption, then it shouldn't be too painful.

I ended up going with a PCI card with a Ralink RT2500 chipset because it was inexpensive (less than $30), it had 802.11g support, and the manufacturer had open-sourced the drivers. Unfortunately, the version 1.0 "stable" driver for kernel 2.6 wasn't (the 1.1 beta is fine, though) and I never did figure out how to get WPA-PSK set up (although, admittedly, I didn't try terribly hard). Not the easiest hardware installation I've ever done, but it could have been worse. At least it wasn't that hard to get a basic network connection, even if it isn't as secure as I'd like.