Linux WIFI
 

This is a somewhat open-ended question. I have a laptop that I'm looking to install linux on. I've poked around various distributions and it seems that wifi support is still a bit rough. Has anyone had success getting wifi going on any particular distribution? At this point I'm distribution-agnostic and NIC-agnostic as it is fairly available. I'm looking for a PCMCIA card supporting 802.11b.

Thanks in advance.

I got it working with Knoppix 3.3, but I'm sure it would work with most distros out there...

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...hreadid=131307

take a look at the LQ hardware compatability list. You'll see a lot of success with various wireless hardware.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php

I have a toshiba 9100 with an inbuilt PCMCIA wifi card and suse 9.0 (orinoco chipset)
SuSE correctly identified the card, but had to edit some of the configuration files to actually get it working.

I have a Toshiba 2210CDT with a TRENDnet TEW-221PC (was $25) PCMCIA cardbus wireless card on Debian Unstable.

The TRENDnet card uses the ADM8211 chipset, which has official drivers for 2.4 kernels, and I've got it to work with the 2.6 kernel.

I've got a laptop with a netgear MA401 (I put in the entry for it in the link given by superbondbond...you should take a look) and it works out of the box with both Mandrake and Knoppix...

Linux WiFi - Mandrake 9.2 and Orinoco
 

I found Mandrake 9.2 to work well with an Orinoco Gold card. As you install the software, make sure your Wi-Fi card is installed in the PCMCIA slot so that the installation can detect it and install the wireless options package.

Once Mandrake is installed, configure the card from root with a series of commands. For an open unencrypted access point the commands look like this:

iwconfig eth0 essid "libraryssid"
iwconfig eth0 enc off

For an encrypted access point the commands look like this:

iwconfig eth0 essid "homessid"
iwconfig eth0 key 0123-4567-89AB-CDEF-0123-4567-89 (128bit hex key)
iwconfig eth0 enc on

The command iwconfig by itself shows you the current configuration

Then the following command gets you an IP address:

ipclient

Make sure that the wireless card config matches the port that is running the card (you might have to try eth1)

Once a series of commands work for you, put them into a script and execute them for each venue you go to. I have several scripts for wherever I go: home, work, library, bar, tmobile.

I have several other wireless cards (Cisco 350, netgear MA401), but I have only tried the MA401 with Mandrake (works too). My Cicso card is at work. Note that the Orinoco card I used is the 802.11b card, not one of the new combo cards.

One of the nice things about the Orinoco Gold card is that it has an external antenna jack, decent receive sensitivity (the more negative the better), and good output power. The external antenna jack allows you to connect the client card to an antenna with a "pigtail". This allows you to get better directionality (and distance from an access point). I also prefer external cards because internal cards rarely let you at the antenna jack.

Konrad

i got an ma401, same as tcaptain, and it worked great with Man 9.1. am just about to buy another one on ebay - they're pretty cheap!