Hi all,

A friend of mine just bought a used Sony Vaio laptop and asked me to put Linux on it. I managed to install Mandrake 10.0 Community with only minor difficulties. I got the wireless networking going fine using my own PCMCIA wireless LAN card which is an Orinoco Silver card manufactured by Agere Systems.

Here's the problem. I went into town today to buy another one of these great cards and I couldn't find any store that had it in stock. There was a slightly different version of the Orinoco Silver which was being sold under a different brand, but unfortunately this card didn't work at all.

So... here's my Linux question. Can anyone recommend a 802.11-g (54Mbps) or 802.11-b (11Mbps) wireless network card that works well with Mandrake 10?

I would prefer not to recompile the kernel but I can do this if necessary. The real problem is that I just don't have the time. My friend needs his new Linux laptop soon.

When doing the OS installation, I chose the option for LSB (Linux Standards Base) and as a result the default kernel is still 2.4 and not 2.6.

I would really appreciate any help. I have read, searched, and googled for hours and I have yet to find a nice concise list of 802.11-g cards that work with Linux. Even the hardware database at the Mandrake website was of very little help.

Regards

DB

I think that it might be necessary to upgrade to a 2.6 series kernel because they have more support for Wireless networking. So if I were you I would go get the 2.6.4 kernel and see if you can get it installed with that.

Thanks Pwnz3r,

The boot screen has the option to boot either 2.4 or 2.6. Next time I go into town I will do two things:

(1) I will take the laptop and try both kernels, and;
(2) I will probably go for an 802.11-b card which is better supported.

Thanks for the info.

DB

The problem is that the kernels are compiled to have every possible module on the computer due to the way Mandrake does things. However, sometimes they seem not to put the correct stuff in there. You can try it, but if it doesn't work then you might to compile your own.