Wireles G card that works. A Netgear wg511 ver 2.0 not 3.0

My experience with Netgear wg511 version 2 wireless G cards.

Seen here that netgear wg511 54mb G card works under linux using the prism54 driver. Bought one at staples and had no luck. After about 2 hours research I found something metioning if the box says Made In China it will not work. The ones that say made in Taiwan work perfect. Found one at Circuit City for $39.00 after rebate. Now future note I downloaded the following file 1.0.4.3.arm from http://prism54.org/~mcgrof/firmware/1.0.4.3.arm. Renamed it to isl3890 and put in it my /lib/firmware directory. If it does not exist create it. Now I have already have compiled my prism54 driver in the last kernel compile so was ready to go.

With kernel compiled and file in place. I rebooted to the new kernel and waited for all to come up. Once KDE was up I plugged in the Netgear card and turn on eth1. Eth1 was already configured since I was using a Linksys wpc11 version 2 card. I was on the network and running. Very simply to do finally. Runs on B & G routers no problem. Only thing is it does not beep when the card is inserted but I will need to add it to /etc/pcmcia/config file for that to work.

Now the other China version 2 will work with Ndiswrapper.

If it is a ver3 then ndiswrapper will be the only way to go.

With all that said kiddies get out there and get them while they last.

REMEMBER: Made in Taiwan is GOOD Made in China BADDDDD!
REMEMBER: Ver2 Good Ver3 BADDDDD!

Brian1
" Google the Linux way @ http://www.google.com/linux "

Search strings netgear wg511 ver2 ver3 B&G

A good piece of advice would be to go to ndiswrapper.com first, and look at the list of cards. If a card has v1, v2, v3... and so on with the same model number but a whole bunch of versions, don't buy anything from that company

I have good luck with motorola cards. Ndiswrapper supports them and they seem to have good signal strength too...

Yeah, my laptop had a broadcom chip built in. I do have it running for connectivity using ndiswrapper, but it is no good for proper wardriving and wifi penetration testing.

So I also went to Staples and got the Netgear 511 Cardbus. Luckily it was revision 1, so uses the prism chipset. The newer ones should work fine with ndiswrapper, but again: no RFMON mode = no passive wireless sniffing.

Thanks for the tip about "made in china", I didn't know. I did know there was a new revision that used broadcom, I just decided to risk it after making sure Staples would take it back.

Leads me to a side point:
You apparently don't need to know jack about computers to be a Staples "computer associate":

Me: I just want to make sure I can bring this back if it doesn't work
Staples guy: Oh, it will work, the drivers are on a cdrom in the box
Me: I don't use windows, the drivers are useless to me.
Staples guy: They will work with a Mac too (note: they don't)
Me: I'm not using a Mac either, I use Linux
Staples guy: Oh, Linux, the drivers in the box will work.
Me: Look, just tell me if I can return this OK?

Computer associates at Staples are whoever got hired when they needed a computer associate at staples. (i used to work at that horrible place).