Slackware Wireless Dongle or Wifi card?
 

hey folks.

I currently run Slackware 10.2 and need to run wifi for my ibook, just for my ibook. I'd like to purchase a USB dongle for my linux machine, but from what i read the support for that method is patchy.

Moving on from that, i could buy an access point for my local network which is a little overkill. I was thinking of purchasing a wireless card, and installing that then routing via nat etc. My question is there a _known_ working card for slackware, that would connect to my ibook's wireless (airport, backwards compat afaik).

Any advice/comments would be extremely helpful :)

Scott.

The short answer: Not really.

The longer answer: Slackware does not have a 'default' wireless setup or 'integrated' wireless cards.

Slackware is not a distro for instant gratification. You have to work at it.

That being said, you can use wlan-ng or ndiswrapper, and some cards/products have native drivers for GNU/Linux. What you should do is figure what you want EXACTLY, then see what the requirements are. For example, I had an old DLink DWL 650P1 card. I had to compile wlan-ng and the 2.6 kernel to use it. I recently purchased a Linksys 'g' card, and used ndiswrapper. (I have since found a native linux driver for it, but not happy with it's performance)

The advantage to Slackware's 'barebones' approach is that you can add whatever you need. The compile options from source are usually very well supported for almost any program.

Post back when you decide which card you want to use.

Yep, i chose an Ralink USB dongle and was setup and working within 20 minutes :D There are native drivers for the chipset, which work wonderfully well (there is a slight issue with it jacking load averages up a little, but no system slowdown).

Thank you for the reply!

Yep i use the DWL-122 USB Wireless dongle in Slackware as well - i use the RT2570 driver and it also works perfect (although i did spent a while setting it up initially) --
Im unsure which dongle you got but i can say that i found a problem with the rt2570 driver and the USB i have. It will crash the system if i unplug it from the machine without doing:
#ifconfig rausb0 down
#modprobe -r rt2570
+ then remove the dongle..

interesting, i don't have that problem with mine, i can just yank it out :]