I own a linksys w54 wifi card which works fine on my Windows partition, however is proving to be difficult to get my debian sarge installation to talk to it.

Does anyone have a wifi card recommendation that will work with a debian sarge installation?

If you install ndiswrapper, you will probably be able to get some functionality out of your wifi card, as it uses the windows driver.

I have used ndiswrapper before on a mandrake installation, however I am finding it very hard to setup on Debian.

I am getting frustrated with the constant stream of compiler error messages I am getting when trying to setup ndiswrapper and I really am not an expert at compiling the kernel.

I would prefer purchasing a wifi card that works straight away with native linux drivers instead of wrapping a windows one, if anyone knows of one then pease let me know.

I have an IBM laptop that uses the atheros chipset. Its supported with the mad-wifi module. There are intel cards that are supported and many others. Just google for linux supported wifi and you will find something. Thats not saying that you wont have to do some compiling or configuring (especially with debian) but it shouldnt be hard to find one that will work. Maybe let us know what your probelms are with ndswrapper and hopefully you can get it wworking instead of having to buy a new one.

Hello,

While I don't know of any PCI cards that work right out of the box with linux, hopefully I can help with the ndiswrapper compilation.

Here are the steps I use whenever I need to compile ndiswrapper:

Add
to your /etc/apt/sources.list

Run
Then run
This should make sure you have all the development tools needed to compile ndiswrapper. Also, apt-get the kernel-headers package that matches the kernel-image you are using. To see the different kernel-headers, do an
So, for example, I'm using kernel-image-2.6.8-1-k7 for my kernel image. So I would want to install the kernel-headers-2.6.8-1-k7 package.

Now you should have all the necessary stuff to compile ndiswrapper. Next go to /usr/src/ and untar the ndiswrapper package. Go in the modules/ndiswrapper directory and run
Everything should compile correctly, and if it does, you will have two new dpkg files waiting in the directory above.

Now one thing I have noticed when I install the kernel-headers package (and it might not be for the 2.6.8 package, but if compiling still doesn't work, check this out) is that the symlink /lib/modules/2.6.8-1-k7/source is broke. It is pointing to a nonexistant directory. So you will need to remove it and recreate it with:

Hopefully that helps you get your card up and running until you find a native one

As someone already mentioned, Atheros chipsets will work with Jean Tourhille's wireless extensions. For instance, I use a Netgear WG511T which basically worked out of the box in SuSE. I don't see why it would be otherwise in Debian.