I've been searching and searching through the boards, and even on other sites such as linuxcompatible.com but I can't come to a conclusion on a good wireless pcmcia card for my laptop. Right when I've decided to get one, I read a post about how it's so hard to set up this one... or "I heard that this card worked with linux but I can't get it to work!"

When I read those posts I tend not to buy the hardware that is being referenced. I've been looking at proxim, linksys wpc11, netgear, and d-link.

What I want to know is what is the best card out there for linux, handsdown! I've heard that the orninoco driver is the best but I'm not positive on that. Anyone.. please help. I'm not reposting.. honest

I'm assuming that by the lack of responses that Linux doesn't like to use wireless?

I'm using 5 different devices from 5 different manufacturers (3 cardbus, 1 pcmcia, 1 pci) with mandrake, slackware and redhat, and frankly, it's hard to recommend a card for two reasons:
1. Manufacturers change chipsets without announcing it to the public, some (D-Link, grrr) do not even change the model number when they do this. This typically does not affect windows users since they are privileged (due to huge market share) to have the correct driver on the disc in the box. This typically hugely affects linux users who would like to buy a certain chipset as opposed to a specific brand, it's very difficult to order these things by which chipset and radio chip they are using. Online specs do not list this info, or the FCCID which could be used to id the chipset, so the last 2 cards I ordered by model number, I ordered by phone and requested the oldest back-stock cards they had, I still ended up with "revision 2" cards which brings me to the 2nd reason it's hard to recommend a card:
2. Most people asking this question are looking for an experience where they stick the card in and it works with very little if any intervention on their part. This happened once for me with a borrowed dwl-650 rev1 card, and not since. The other cards all work but I had to id the chipsets, find, download and compile the drivers and configure them from the console. All do-able, but not appealing to people expecting a windows-like installation.
3. that's my 2 cents

Thank you very much for the reply. Just last night I ended up ordering a DWL-650, not the 650+. While ordering though, I found a good price for one and was about to order, but I noticed that the picture (wasn't sure if it was just a generic picture) didn't have the triangular antenna on it. So I backed off and went to another place where the antenna looked right. So, let's hope it's one with a good chipset!

Thanks!

Here's to hoping the item you get is the same as the picture...

if it's not, don't despair, revision 2 of that card is using ADMtek chips, I have 2 different cards with that chipset and they both work with linux, I've heard-tell that the revision after that is a TI acx100 chipset (same as the +, but somehow not using the convolutional code to achieve 22mbps), again, this is what I've heard. I have 2 acx100 cards and both work with linux, thanks to the hard-working folks writing the driver.