Recommendations which wireless card to use?
 

Hi,

are there any recommendation by this community which wireless PCI cards are recommended to use with Linux?

I tried to get hold of a NETGEAR WG 311, since I heard that (at least version 1) should work with the MADWIFI drivers, but somehow it looks like that a couple of people seem to have problems with this card.

I have no idea about other manufacturers so far, since I only focused on this card up to now. So I hope to get some hints from those who got a 54MBit card up and running under Linux already, preferrably using a free driver (meaning excluding linuxant).

Marko

I have the Dlink G650 right now, still trying to get madwifi installed it should work with it or the ar5k drivers should.
This card is b/g and I think it can also handle A also

get a wrapper and use the windows drivers. ex. ndiswrapper, linuxant
linuxant worked great with my girlfriends dell only catch is you only get a month free then $20 for permanant liscense, but comes in RPM so is effortless. Most others are free.

As I wrote before I'd like to skip non-free and/or Windows drivers (ndiswrapper, linuxant) and rather rely on true free and open source (of course the firmware/HAL will be closed still for a while). But it looks like that the free alternatives still do not offer the quality you find with Windows, unfortunately.

On the other hand I understood by now that the Prism chipsets (though a little harder to install, since it's connected with a modification of the kernel) seem to have a quite good support. There is the http://hostap.epitest.fi/ which already includes functioning WPA-PSK and probably http://www.prism54.org/ will have the same soon.

So I guess I should go for a Prism based card instead of a Atheros one...

I fianlly got my G650 D-Link up and working and it works nicely
The only thing I have trouble with is it wont work if I boot up with the card in

What happened after booting?

We have tested a numerous number of cards and found that the best for ease of use are:
(if price ain to much of an issue)

3com
dlink

The drivers are freely available and easy to use on most OS ś

Hi,

in between I found on prism54.org for the best supported PCI card a SMC 2802W:

Status: Perfect
Success count: 289
Failure count: 44
Success rate: 87% (not too bad)

Which 3com or DLINK cards would be advsiable for PCI?

Marko

For Dlink:
I would recomend the XtremeG - DI624 for routing or DWL-2100AP for Standard Access point.
for a pci card I would use DWL-G520.
At 108Mbps data bandwidth, the 802.11g D-Link Xtreme G with enhanced 108 delivers excellent and consistent data rate throughput.

For 3com:
An excelent PCI is the 3CRDAG675. Speeds up to 54Mbps or 108 in turbo mode. Easy to set up. Administrators can create specific profiles with specialise wireless settings and then the use just selects the profile.

if money isnt a matter get cisco :p
netgear is also nice ;)

Which drivers do you use with these cards? Which chipsets do they use?

Well, which card would you recommend then?

Well, I sort of settled on the WG 311 already, but I understood that the madwifi driver still has its problems...

U can try hostap!

http://hostap.epitest.fi/
I am using it for about 2 months with no problems (use hostap-driver-0.1.3.tar.gz --> last stable)

Hi JJX,

a bit up on this list you'll see that I found this alternative already. Good to see that I evaluated that properly. hostap seems to be a good piece of code. The only one actually which seems to be able to handle re-keying properly. WPA with PSK is possible, which is much better than a RADIUS-based authentication. That is simply unsuitable for a home network consisting of a computer and a router... ;)

Would be interesting to know which card you successfully use!!

I have 2 Netgear MA311GE and my linux box usually has uptime10-15 days (i reboot for minor other reasons... no ups :( )

I am not using the pc for a home network (indoor) so i dont know if it works... (but why not?)

Did u had any problem with configuration? Maybe we can help :)