Hi,

I am looking at getting a cheap wireless card for my desktop. It is really a playground computer that I am using to learn linux and use as a basic file server. It would be nice to use it wirelessly instead of working in a 2m radius with the cable I have.

Since this is only a play computer and isn't ever going to be a world beater I don't want to throw the best hardware at it and I was wondering if anyone has had any luck with hardware from ebay? I know that ebay can be a dumping ground for useless junk, and I know that people have struggled to get them working with windows even, but it would be nice if I could find a cheap solution.

Has anyone got any experience with something like the following?

Thanks

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/WiFi-Adapter-P...QQcmdZViewItem

Not sure of situation in UK(?), but here brand-name stuff is often more expensive on ebay 'buy it now' than from discount mail-order.

Wireless adapters are a bit of a minefield for linux users as the big manufacturers often switch hardware without changing the model number. So even after doing your homework you can end up with an unsupported chipset.

But some dealers on ebay specialize in this sort of hardware and give quite detailed information. The one you link to does not seem to give enough info to ensure compatibility. Personally I wouldn't buy it, especially as the postage looks exhorbitant.

I know flash memory is a big scam on ebay, and I would be a bit careful about buying easily counterfeited stuff like RAM modules, but wifi adapters are already so cheap it would hardly be worth it. Your main problem is to ID something linux-compatible.

One suggestion I'll give is to do a little Google research on the ones you become interested in. Get the model number, and version number if there is one, and search for what chip it uses and how well it works in Linux. As maroonbaboon mentioned, vendors will often rerelease a device under the same model number but with a different chip under the hood. They're the ones that often have a version number. The Netgear MA111 and WG511 are examples.

A cheap one I might recommend would be the Hawking HWU54G USB adapter. It looks just like the early Sandisk Cruzers and uses the zd1211 chip, which recent linux kernels provide the driver for.

As pointed out on another thread Hawking have switched their cardbus unit HWC54G from a supported chip to the less well supportex ACX111. Can't be too careful

Hi,

Thanks for your input, It's definitely a mine field as far as wireless goes. I was hoping that someone may have taken the gamble. For £10 I may still give it a go, it isn't that much to lose and I am sure I could put it in a windows computer instead.

I will look around for alternatives that are more likely to work

David

Hi,

So I went ahead and did it. I got a cheap card (£10) from amazon. I did a bit of reasearch and found that this card (tp-link tl-wn500g) works with linux, plus it was cheap enough that it doesn't matter too much if it doesn't work.

When I plug it into my mobo (asus p2b-ds) I can't get the computer to boot at all! It doesn't even get as far as a memory check! I changed the pci slot it was in and still a no go Take out the new wireless card and it boots up without a problem.

I wasn't expecting this to be my problem! Anyway, before I contact the seller, does anyone have any ideas what I can do to try to get this to work?

Thanks

Do you have any other cards to test in the slots, or another computer to test the new card in? Does the computer have a lot of stuff already in it that may be maxing out the power supply? I've seen that happen and cause similar symptoms.

I had a bit of a play yesterday, since I have a couple of spare pci slots. Here is what I found.

-With neither the ethernet or wifi card in the computer would not boot past the POST.
-With only the wifi card in the computer would not boot past the POST.
-Replace the ethernet card in any slot and it will boot.
-add I then put the wifi card in the slot the ethernet card was in and put the ethernet card in a different slot and it booted!?!
-I installed the madwifi drivers but it did not recognise the wifi card
-I powered off and tried to restart and the computer now it hangs after the detection of the hard drive/cd drive/floppy drive

I don't know how to diagnose this? I don't have too much in this computer (I don't think), although power draw might be on the high side - dual processor, 2 hard drives, dvd, floppy, video card - but then if it is how did I managed to boot up that one time? I will try and remove all drives except the one with the OS on and see how that changes the situation.

I tried again with all accessory drives, etc removed and still no joy! I don't understand why I managed to get it to boot once with the wireless card and not again?

This is very confusing. Does anyone have any last ideas I can try before I start again?

Thanks

Do you have access to another computer to try the wireless card in? Other than that, my last idea is to make sure all the cables in the computer are connected tightly. When inserting a card it's easy to tug one just enough to make an unstable connection. An IDE cable barely loose on one corner can cause intermittent hard drive detection failures.