what wireless network devices are compatible
with RedHat Linux 7.3!??
and where to buy them!??

thanx!

*btw, a 'how to' would be great*

I most recently checked through the how-tos over at Linux-doc and found them to be quite a bit out of date. Here's a shortlist of realllllly compatible hardware:

The Cisco Aironet series cards, so much so that I hardly answer posts about them.

The Orinoco/Lucent series of cards, the longest history of support in the kernel, 3 years since the early days of the standard.

The Prism2 series cards, Linksys, Belkin, Dlink, a bit of a pain sometimes, especially with Linksys's wpc11 V2.5+3, but useable and available nearly everywhere.

Honestly I've seen the best range out of the Cisco cards, but the Lucent cards tend to be zero headache, just downloading one .conf file so as to make cardmgr load the right modules.

Also, the past two years has made it nice and easy; make sure you've installed wireless_tools: iwconfig, iwpriv, iwspy... blah blah blah they're all in that one package, on the RH CD. They help you set up the things like mode, essid, rate, and encryption, which is just about all you ever have to fiddle with.

Cheers,

Finegan

Get one of the Orinocos. I have a DLink DWL-650 and it works but some packets are being dropped and I can't run up2date. Just waiting on Redhat to polish up Limbo! Also, when you do buy a wireless card search these forums. Finegan has already answered every wireless configuration question you could ask except for this one.... What's the state of 802.11a in Linux? If 802.11a is supported, buy it over 802.11b. 5 times faster throughput....

Hi,
I have a pair of DWL-520 cards. Do they work with RH?. I put
them in 7.2 but kudzu never recognized them. From some site I
found that DWL-500 is supported but not 520. I it possible to
modify the source for 500 or 650 to get 520 working. If so from
where can I get the source and help about modifying it?

( The card was bought for an ngo called AID to help rural area
networking. It was shipped from US to India with much pain. But
we could never use them for testing. Any hints on this will be
a great help. )
--Sarin

802.11a support: none that I know of. I read of Dave building orinoco to be expanded to cover 802.11a offerings, as with the host_ap prism2 package. If you stumble accross any, please mention it to me. More crap to buy....

The spec for 802.11a is a lot more marketecture than reality. It can do bursting into the realm of about 75Mbit, but as distances increase throughput nosedives to the point where a is kicking it at 1Mbit while b is still holding 2-5.5Mbit. I really need to get a hold of some of this kit to find out how true that is, but largely I think it may take a while to catch on as 802.11b kit is cheaper, much more prevalent, and the standards are completely incompatible, which would require people to replace not just their cards, but the access points.

Cheers,

Finegan

The Drivers that shipped with the 2.4.7 (Isn't that right for RH 7.2?) was version .08b of the driver, RH 7.3 includes version .09b with kernel 2.4.18, neither of which have support for the DWL-520. Annoying eh?

But there is hope!

The driver maintainer is up to v .12b, I think the last set I compiled was .11, on an RH 7.2 laptop, flawlessly. These have support for the DWL-520 PCI card and can be downloaded here.

Also, if you want to get funky with these cards, their chipset will actually handle working as an access point. There's a project to do that here, with a nice mailing list to help you through hurdles.

Lastly, in order to manipulate essid, rate, encryption, blah blah blah you are going to have to have installed the wireless_tools package, available as an RPM on the RedHat CDs. RedHat probably didn't install them by default unless you selected "everything" or "laptop". They still think that wireless=laptop. Again, annoying huh?

Lastly, in order to get the newer orinoco_cs drivers to compile correctly, you're going to have to compile a newer kernel than the 2.4.7 that RedHat shipped with as Dave started using some aspects of the kernel that are only found on or after 2.4.10.

Alternatively, upgrading to RH 7.3 and then simply compiling the orinoco drivers against the 2.4.18 kernel is much simpler.

Lastly, RH's kudzo is never going to find these modules, its using a database that you are not updating when you compile new support. After the modules are compiled they're in 3 parts, modprobed in the following order:

modprobe hermes
modprobe orinoco
modprobe orinoco_pci

Post back if you need any other help/encouragement. There are funkier things to try if your location hinders you from being able to try something like a download of kernel source or a newer release of RH.

Cheers,

Finegan

P.S. Did you notice the 3 lastly's in there? I kept thinking of more stuff.

Lastly, If you don't want to deal with any of that RedHat nonsense, OpenBSD 3.1 and FreeBSD 4.6(? er... the new one), both have support for that card, but they're just not Linux !!!

Thanks a lot for this encouraging reply. We put those
poor people in to trouble by asking them to get any
wireless card. I thinks I will be trying all of these
in next few days. ( We have a good campus network here.
Downloading won't be much of a problem). Also I wanted
to have something more than RH in our DCF. This seems to
be the best time.
Thanks
--Sarin.

will this work under RedHat 7.3 GNOME!??

http://www.bestbuy.com/detail.asp?e=...=540&scat=1572

it says:
Meets all Ethernet IEEE 802.3 and 802.3u and wireless 802.11b standards

System Requirements
Any operating system with Internet Explorer 5x or Netscape 4x

what do u think!??

The bestbuy page shows a "Wireless Cable/DSL Router with 4-Port Switch". That thing runs on its own, all you need is a browser to configure it. So it has nothing to do with your Linux installation, and the Linux Netsape will let you set it up.

mlp

sorry, take a look to this:
http://www.bestbuy.com/detail.asp?e=...=540&scat=1572

you think is good choice!??
i want to run that router with this USB card
do u think i will have problems installing it!??

I've walked exactly 1 guy through the installation of that thing using the worlds quirkiest set of wireless drivers wlan-ng from the www.linux-wlan.net project. They're the only ones that support the prism2 chipset under USB, and knowing Linksys they've made a rev to the chipset that makes the wlan drivers not work. USB under Linux is great for little things like keyboards and mice, but a headache otherwise.

802.11b PCI or USB kit is less than a year old (not including plx cards), so even with the easier of the two options, the PCI card, you're looking at having to compile some drivers by hand, unless you want to blow a ton of cash and find a prism2.5 pcmcia card (getting harder now that 3 is out) and a PLX adapter, RH 7.3's 2.4.18 kernel will find that out of the box.

Really though, buy the Linksys PCI card, or the Dlink 520 go here, download v.12, compile those, make sure to install wireless tools from the RH CDs, and then you're set. Its a little hastle, about $20 more than USB, and fifteen times easier than the linux-wlan project.

Cheers,

Finegan

wichone's better!??
Linksys PCI card, or the Dlink 520!??

I really liked the Linksys cards:
the access point:
http://www.buy.com/retail/computers/...1883&loc=14451

the card:
http://www.buy.com/retail/computers/...1817&loc=14451

do u think it will work under redhat7.3!??

if so i'm getting both!

thanx!

A)Any access point will do, you can play mix and match between brands. Heck my access point is a P1 133 laptop with a prism2 WPC11 V2 pcmcia card running in ad-hoc mode while most of the clients are D-Link 500s (I think... the pcmcia one), Orinoco/Lucent Silvers, Cabletron Roamabout, and occasionally a 3com Airconnect. They all speak the same protocol, no need for brand loyalty.

B) I'd argue the Dlink card just due to Linksys's tendancy to change things ever so slightly (enough to have to track down some weird linux patch), during the same model number and version of a card. Yeah, 2 identical Linksys NICs off of the same shelf I bought once, and one didn't work until I updated the driver.

Although I'm kinda surprised the WMP11 is that cheap now, makes me almost... nah...

Remember, no matter what, in order to get the pci card to work, you're going to have to compile some new kernel modules.

Cheers,

Finegan

Hi,
I compiled 2.4.18 and orinco (0.11b) on RH7.2. lsmod shows all the modules. But when I do iwconfig, I get this error message.
[root@fw-ee RPMS]# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.
eth0 no wireless extensions.
eth0:0 no wireless extensions.
eth0:1 no wireless extensions.
eth1 no wireless extensions.
Also there is no /proc/net/wireless directory. Is there any spl. option that I missed in kernel compilation?.
I saw hermes.conf and found only DWL-650. Did I download a wrong source?.
I am also trying to get freebsd-4.6. So far got 3 cds 4th one is comming. Once I get that I will try it also.

Thanks,
--Sarin.

Forgot to add this. ( I was in a hurry. My login timed out 3 times so far and I have to retype it that many times.)
I already had a eth1 on the m/c. I removed that and put the wireless card in that place. But I did ifconfig eth1 down. Can that be a problem?.
--Sarin.