Apple Airport card for wireless on Debian
 

Greetings to all,

I have an old Powerbook G4 that I want to get wireless up and running on. If I put an old Airport card in it (or a compatible one such as this for example) is this supported under most modern distributions, more or less out of the box? I am running Debian Etch 2.6.18-4-powerpc incidentally.

Many thanks,

- Perps.

I think most Aiport cards used a Broadcom chipset, but run lspci in a console to make sure. If it is a Broadcom card, the only option you've got is the bcm43xx driver. It has been in the kernel since 2.6.17, but there have been a lot of bug fixes since then so you may want to use a newer kernel. You'll also have to install firmware by cutting it from a driver with the fwcutter program.

Thanks for the reply Hangdog42.

I've been looking around and decided that I would go for a card that supported 802.11g (unlike the original Airport cards) for the PCMIA slot. Any card that uses the Broadcom chipset should be a goer using the bcm43xx driver yes? I've been looking at getting a Belkin F5D7010 or F5D7011, which use this chipset according to this.

Many thanks,

- PerpsTherapy.

Yes and no. When it comes to playing with the bcm43xx, not all Broadcom chipsets work well. Probably the most prevalent example of a poorly supported Broadcom chipset is the 4318. To be honest, if I was buying a new card, I would probably avoid Broadcom based gear. They offer zero Linux support and apparently couldn't care less about Linux.

If you're looking at cards, Intel chipsets seem to be well supported, but the bottom line is that on a G4 machine you must get a card with native Linux support. Ndiswrapper is simply not an option here, so be sure to do your homework on this.