Easiest/Best Wireless Pci Card for Debian 2.6.6.8

transiency · 07-28-2006, 04:58 PM

I recently purchased a wireless pci card for my Debian Stable 2.6.6.8 Linux Box. It is a Netgear WG311 V3 and i am having a lot of trouble installing in. Downloaded ndiswrapper and used the drivers from the disk and it worked was able to connect etc, but it has already crashed my kernel once; and I have since been unable to connect with ifup wlan0. I was wondering if anyone knows a good card to get if i should return this one? Any Card (chipset) that is easily supported? Thanks.

pljvaldez · 07-28-2006, 05:10 PM

http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/sh...t=3249&cat=149

Looks like it uses the Marvell Chipset. This might be available in a newer kernel in which case you could just recompile a 2.6.17 kernel to include it (if it's available).

After a little googling, looks like the only way you'll get it working is with ndiswrapper. You can look here for wireless cards and see if you can find one that's compatible. Unfortunately they don't seem to be sorted by "wireless"

ozymandias · 07-29-2006, 12:49 PM

I can recommend the TP-Link TL-WN650G. It uses the Atheros chipset, well supported by Madwifi. Mine is running on Debian 2.4.27 and was quite easy to get up and running. It works in 'normal' client mode, goes in and out of monitor mode to allow (eg.) airodump-ng to work and also works in access point mode to create a wireless network.
The only problem I'm having is getting it to work in WDS (repeater) mode, but this is asking a lot from a card which only cost £18 on ebay! 108Mb too!

JaseP · 07-31-2006, 06:47 PM

I have an Atheros 5212- based card. It works well with madwifi drivers.

Trick is, use the ifup/down commands to turn off the ethernet ports, use wpa_supplicant, and to monitor the condition of getting an internet IP, use wpa_gui...

The tricky part is the wpa_supplicant.conf.

Of course, I'm using Debian Etch on my laptop...