i've spent the past few weeks setting up a perfect slackware 12.1 - mpd music server for my college apartment. last year we had a classic cable modem - wireless router setup and i planned to get the music server onto the lan by plugging it into the router with ethernet. but today i found out that my apartment complex has added wireless internet... i suspect it is a wireless router for the whole building, and they give us a password... total pain in the ass but i'm not paying for my own internet service if they give it to us for free.

i spent the past few hours hiding, read-onlying, and password protecting all of my shares, and changing the fstab on the jukebox, so i should be secure. i just need to get that box on wireless.

i dont really know whether to go with USB or PCI but i would think PCI for linux, USB seems like i would have to do ndiswrapper.

i am looking at this cheap adapter: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16833166020.

if you look into it, this card is based on ralink rt61 which is supposedly supported well in linux. the driver rt2x00 is built into my version of the kernel, so i should be covered there too. my question is, when i plug that PCI card into my computer, what is the procedure? will it be ready to configure or will it need some sort of installation? i have never added new hardware to a pre-existing linux installation.

Avoid USB wireless adapters like plague. They're buggy and unstable even with ndiswrapper.

PCI is a better but, but still wireless setup and configuration is a royal pain in the backside compared to good old ethernet.

About the ralink card, once you plug it in, either Linux should automatically detect the relevant kernel modules, or you can add a line to your appropriate config file /etc/rc.d/rc.modules to modprobe the module manually on boot