Ok, i want to retire my laptop to a linux only system for play purposes because i hardly use it these days... i have had redhat 8 running on it and that detected everything fine and it all ran flawlessly so i know the hardware is fine.. the only problem i have is with my wifi card (suprise suprise)..

i was trying to get a Dlink dwl-650+ to work, i believe it has a Ti chipset so i have therefore given up and am now after a new card with a Prism chipset

so i want to start fresh.. and ask:

a) which distro will give me the widest h/w support, i am very drawn towards SuSE, but Redhat and Mandrake are equally aceptable.. i am currently downloading mandrake 10.

b) which pcmcia cards are actually recommended? I see alot of 'im having problems with' threads but no success threads...

I know it is 'possible' to get pretty much any card running after my very thorough searching online for info... but i am after the least hassle method, so i think this puts g cards out of the window...

my ideal set up would be suse 9.1 with some sort of 3com x-jack offering in either a B or G flavour..

but any advice or pointers would be great

cheers

chris

You can check out the hcl link from the front page of this site and find info on various network cards.

I personally use a D-Link DWL-AG650 card on Slackware 9.1 using the madwifi drivers. It took me all of 5 minutes to setup. There is a good FAQ here:

http://www.mattfoster.clara.co.uk/madwifi-faq.htm

and the drivers are here:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi

This driver is for Atheros chipsets. I know it isn't the Prism you were talking about but you said any advice/pointers were welcome.

I've been using the card for about a month now with not one single problem.

I think the Dlink dwl-650+ uses a texas instruments acx100 chip so it will probably work in slackware 9.1 if you follow the instructions in
Craig's acx100 howto.

The driver is beta so no guarantee.

Hows it going?

I just bought a d-link card after weeks of decision making very cheaply
from
http://xppassport.zoovy.com/product/DWL650

delivered and all for 30 Euro to Ireland and it worked flawlessly (i.e. kismet
with the wlan-ng drivers)
for me so i would definitely think it would be your best bet.As for a distro
i think there is no rival to Mandrake 10 which is also available on dvd
with the brilliant magazine linux format which can easily be got in Ireland
and England but here is the site anyway.

http://www.linuxformat.co.uk/

Any others who see this thread i would advice them to get a subscription.Its
worth its weight in gold.

prompt

Why do they make completly different equipment with nearly the same name, its just daft.

Well i have a DWL-122 it is a wireless usb adapter 802.11b that uses the prism chipset. I am using it under MDK 9.2, set up with the Linux-wlan-ng driver. The only problem is that you need the linux kernel source to set the driver up. i used the downloadable version of mdk which didnt come with the kernel source. but all in all it works well if you have an open usb port

I've had great success with Slackware, a couple of the Netgear cards (both are 802.11b), and the hostap drivers.

On my desktop PC I use a Netgear MA311 PCI card. I also have an old Itronix laptop (awesome hardware... can withstand a drop onto concrete from 3 feet... see http://www.itronix.com/products/notebooks/xc6250pro.asp ) that I've been able to use a Netgear MA401 PCMCIA card with. That laptop is set up as my wireless access point with iptables firewalling/NAT, dhcpd dynamic host configuration, samba Windows file sharing, and the qmail email server. My Sony Vaio laptop also uses the Netgear MA401 in managed mode to access the Internet through my Itronix.

I wrote an article last year that explains how to set up a PC using the Netgear MA311 PCI card. You can find it at http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ticle&artid=45 . I converted to the Itronix laptop after I wrote that article, but it is mostly the same setup. If there is enough interest I'll add details on configuring the PCMCIA wireless cards.

Here is a guide for the DWL-122

http://julian.coccia.com/article-53.html

Nothing like resurrecting an old thread & leading it off topic a bit, but I have a shopping cart full of Itronix laptops & was wondering if you'd been able to get the touch screens to work?
What's the minimum CPU & RAM you'd recommend?