wireless usb adapter for Fedora 8
 

i purchased this cheap ol laptop just for random uses off the net out of hong kong. Can't get the Atheros internal wireless card to work and i've tried everything...Anyone know of a good compatible wireless USB adapter that will work with Fedora 8? and will support WPA encryption?...can't use PCMCIA as this has no slot for it, only an express card. So looking for USB Wireless...anyone know? thanks

If the internal chipset is truly Atheros, I would think madwifi would work - it's generally pretty solid.

USB Wireless NICs generally seem to be the most troublesome.

As pentode says, Atheros is usually one of the least troublesome of the wireless adaptors.

If you'd like to paste the output of the command:

/sbin/lspci -v

where it relates to your wireless card we may be able to offer a better opinion.

Wireless USB is a mixed bag because the manufacturers of the cards seem to feel free to change the chipset inside them without changing the main descriptor for the card.

Hence I can tell you that a Netgear WG111 v2 USB wireless stick will work but I can't tell you about any of the other versions.

I got mine off e-bay by the way and it works with the built in rt61/rt2*** driver.

Edit: I was confusing my WG111 with a different pci wireless card. My Netgear WG111 v2 uses the rtl8187 driver and although it appears to load all the relevant parts, even to the extent of finding available wireless networks, it's one of those that just won't connect to anything!