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 :)

Hi JJX,

I am about to decide which hardware to use for my home network. I want to get rid of the cables crossing my path, which are sort of snares for my little daughters... That's why I decided to go for WLAN.

Since I also want to change to ADSL, see my other poll at
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=184546

Well, I'd like to get a 2MBit/s connection, so I have to go for at least 54MBit/s router and netcards. I think that the MA311GE is for a not g, right?!

I found in another thread on this site that cisco even hands out a self-made driver for their cards
http://www.cisco.com/en/US/products/.../ps4555/ps448/

Maybe that's something worth to give a try. Perhaps the driver wouldn't be open source, but if it works...

Marko

I've heard that the 3Com 3CRDAG675 doesn't work very well with Linux, that it is because it use a Chipset that doesn't support Linux (Atheros) but if you want to, you can use the Madwifi. It may work, but in my opinion, it will not be the best choice, if I were you I'll use a 3Com 3CRWE154G72 due to the fact that it use a Prism chipset, but you still need to use the Ndiswrapper for it to perform good enough under Linux.

I'll really apreciete if anyone of you guys know a 3Com or a Trendnet card that supports Linux (without the Ndiswrapper), use a Prism chipset and use a PCI interface.

Asagath

is there a difference between d-link DWL-G520+ and dlink DWL-G520?
or just the speed?

As far as I know the only difference is the speed.

Just the speed

ok thanks.
i have forgottn:
Is there a difference between
DWL-520+ and DWL-G520+ ?
sorry....

The difference is this:
dwl-520+ = acx100 chipset, radio chip varies
dwl-g520+ = acx111 chipset, radio chip varies

both are supported *natively* (ie: no loading/wrapping of other os's drivers) by the acx100.sourceforge.net driver, however the acx111 is still somewhat experimental and wep support is not yet finished, the acx100 support is very robust and near rock-solid at this point.

For Linux Operating System,I would recommend you buy any of the following PCI cards.(I have personally used them)
in RedHat 9

* 802.11g cards : DWL-G520,DWL-AG650, NetGear WG311T. (madwifi)
* 802.11b cards: Netgear MA311.(hostap), DWL-520+(acx100)


I found the PC with WG311T card faster in surfing webpages(having lesser traceroute time) than DWL-G520.
I checked this by swapping the cards for same PC 5 times.

Maybe,my dlink card was broken for some reason OR madwifi driver works better with Wg311T--not sure..


Thanks,
Avirup
www.avirup.info

Please notice:
DWL-G520+ and DWL-G520
DWL-520+ and DWL-520
are NOT the same. They have different chips
I have bought DWL-G520+ and saw now that it doesnt work with the driver from:
http://acx100.sourceforge.net/

http://lisas.de/~andi/acx100/ --> if you read the text you will see:

Also, due to confusion about similar card naming (for further information, see
bottom), people keep thinking certain cards they own work with this driver.
Cards that are *NOT* based on ACX1xx chipset (as opposed to the stupidly
similarly named ACX1xx versions DWL-120+, DWL-520+ and DWL-650+, which *do*
have ACX1xx) are:

DWL-120 (PRISM2 chipset)
DWL-520 (PRISM2)
DWL-650 (PRISM2, minus few newer variants which D-Link messed up to have the
ACX100 instead)
DWL-G120 (PRISM GT)
DWL-G520 (Atheros AR5212A)
DWL-G650, version A1 (PRISM GT)
DWL-G650, version B1 (Atheros AR5211)
DWL-G650, version B2 (Atheros AR5001)
DWL-AG520 (Atheros AR5212)
DWL-AB650 (Atheros AR5211)
DWL-AG650 (Atheros AR5212)

lucrative,
I think you may be mistaken about your dwl-g520+ not working with the acx100 driver from sourceforge.net. The only way to be sure is to run lspci -n and see if it shows up as: 104c:9066, which is an acx111 device which will work. Acx100 devices will show up as 104c:8400 or 104c:8401. The numbers should be considered authoritative regardless of make/model since they are what the driver looks for upon load.

hi i have joybook 5000 from benq and there is MIM2000 wlan card quite usual for laptop and nicely running under my suse 9.2 right from the box.
Not need for any ndiswrapper or similar program. I have just one issue with wpa because it seem to not working in suse 9.2 but that is distro problem i trying to fix it now...

oh sorry jes the card is working it was my fault....

Re: Recommendations which wireless card to use?
 

I'm pleased to report that WG311T REV:1 is working great on my MDK10 box.

Originally I installed with Linuxant DriverLoader, which ought to be the benchmark for driver installations on Linux. However, it seems DriverLoader has an issue with the WG311T REV:1 WinXP drivers, which kept on locking up.

I've now got WG311T REV:1 cards working under madwifi. I took my instructions from http://www.madwifi.com and resolved a modprobe issue with the help of the good folks in LQ.

regards