With any card you can use the tools that came with the wireless tools: iwlist, iwconfig, iwspy and so on.

You can use these tools to do everything that Windoze use to do for you automatically: scanning for hotspots, getting an ip address via dhcpcd and stuff like that. There are tools under Linux to do that for you-console and GUI, one is apradar, apradar.sourceforge.net. These tools are so simple that you can fling together somelines of borne shell script to do it for you, or perl.


You still have the ability to wlan jack unsecured wlans( wlans that don't have a password to get on) with ndiswrapper. Basically you have to find them with 'iwlist' and then configure your interface with dhcpcd, 'dhcpcd wlan0' as root. The unsecured, factory default router(even linksys) have dhcpc servers on. I haven't yet tried promiscous mode yet in ndiswrapper. Heh Heh.

To bad it's illegal now. Ahhh...in the old days when we did not know if it's illegal or not to get onto peoples' wlans that don't require authentication, but now we know.