Impossible you say?

Not with my setup:

1. Airport Extreme Base Station (AEBS), from Apple, as router and wireless AP installed in the meter closet -- gives draft-N wireless LAN throughout my house.

2. Airport Express (AX), also from Apple, installed in my study next to the Linux desktop PC and the printer; configured to extend the above LAN and to accept Ethernet clients. The PC connected to the AX Ethernet port, the printer to the AX USB port.

That's it! The PC gets an IP in the same subnet as the wireless LAN; the printer is visible on the LAN as an HP JetDirect printer hosted by the AX.

There is a speed penalty on account of communications to/from the PC having to go through the AX and the AEBS (some processing overhead), but I still get something like 1500 kB/s on my ADSL2+ internet connection. That's good enough for me, at least until the neighbourhood switches to fibre, and even then the 802.11n LAN should be able to match higher speeds.

So, wireless without Linux drivers and ndiswrapper, wouldn't you agree?

Not really, as the PC is still using ethernet. It just has wireless as a midway point between itself and the Internet.

It's the same as having a PC connecting to the Internet by using ethernet to a wireless laptop, as it'd be the laptop that's wireless, not the PC.

No, your kernel do have the pre-installed wifi driver for the particular chipset. E.g. This happened to Intel chipset, where the driver already in the Ubuntu kernel. So, you no need to install any of the driver.

No. I don't believe it. The kernel has to know how to communicate with your hardware before you can actually use the hardware. Most likely the driver, as Paris Heng said, was auto-detected and the module added to the kernel. No extra work on your part to make it work.

Hi,

Your PC is not wireless. You are using the Ethernet to communicate with a wireless link between two AP. With the latter communicating via a DSL to the world.

Oops! I missed that! That is an interesting use of tech, though. But all the same, he is still using drivers to operate his wired card, so my point still stands.

hkoster1,
Do you have encryption configured between the wireless devices?

Of course, the PC (running Linux) uses a driver for the Ethernet interface; but my point was that it does not use (or even needs) a driver for a wireless interface. For those of you who don't know the Airport Express (AX), it is itself a small computer with a wireless interface and an Ethernet interface. The AX needs drivers for both, but that's all taken care of by Apple and the firmware OS installed on the AX; so, no need for a *Linux* wireless driver! And, hence, no need to worry about wireless networking my Linux PC, since Ethernet connectivity is one of those things that most of us take for granted in Linux...

There are other ways to establish such a wireless "bridge", usually called something like "game computer extenders". I checked out the prices of a few, not any cheaper than the AX (and certainly not easier to setup, I gather). Besides, the AX is small enough to take with you on a business trip to set up an instant wireless LAN if the hotel room only has an Ethernet socket.

I mention all of this, since I consider wireless networking the Achilles' heel of Linux-on-the-desktop; my solution finesses that situation.

@SlowCoder: yes, I use WPA2 encryption for the wireless link, as that's the way the Airport Extreme Base Station is configured.

P.S. I still have a bunch of wireless adapters that I've tried in the past and that never worked satisfactorily for me (with or without Ndiswrapper): NetGear WG111v2, Linksys WUSB54GC, SpeedTouch 121g, Linksys WUSB300N. May be picked up for free if anyone's in the neighbourhood, first come first serve...