Best wireless Nic for Slackware 10
 

Looking to buy a wireless nic for Slackware 10 from Ebay. My laptop is a Presario 1925. There are so many problems with wireless nics i would like something that will just work with Slack out of the box and the speed is not an issue, a 11mb card is just fine for me. Yes i know problem solving is a part of learning but believe me i have already went around the world with my other 2 laptops and there nics with FC2, i would like my slack box a little simpler.

The Prism2/2.5/3 cards are well supported.

Personally I prefer the Orinoco Gold cards and have never had any problems with them. The added bonus is that I can attach an external antenna to them for the sheer geekiness of it. The disadvantage is I don't think they have been made for a few years. A couple of places still sell them though (particularly wireless specialty shops). I have 3 (in case one dies) and I am not giving them up.

From what I have seen Prism 2.5 cards are the ones that cause the least problems. The issue with them is figuring out exactly what chipset a particular card uses.


Try here for a more generic answer:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_.../Wireless.html

Cisco Aironet, there's a PCMCIA model that should fit in your laptop.

There's also Prism2 ones as mentioned above (Slack 10 comes with a driver package for them). One of them is the Linksys WUSB11 v2.5 - and only that version - 2.6, 2.8, 3.0 don't work.

Considering the Orinoco but which ones, there is a lucent model, a Proxim model ? Totally confused on what to bid on.

wi-fi PC card
 

I have a Linksys WPC11

With Slackware, I inserted the card and ran

ifconfig eth1 192.168.1.151 broadcast 192.168.1.255 netmask 255.255.255.0

That was all there was to it.

I have been told that the setup wouldn't hold, but it's been in this SONY laptop for months and it just keeps working. Like now.

Proxim and Lucent are the same card just rebadged. Go back far enough and they were called wavelan. If you go ebay, make sure it is a gold not a silver.

http://www.techdepot.com/product.asp...affid=10000485

Is a picture of the gold (not a bad price either but I know nothing about the company, just the first good picture I could find)

EDIT: removed the link noticed it was the A+B combo and I am not sure if it will work.

EDIT AGAIN: Added a new link. Evidentally what I call Orinoco Gold is now Orinoco Gold Classic and costs twice as much now as it did a year and a half ago.

I have a D-Link DWL-122 USB "pen-type" adapter, which is great for portability. It's a Prism-based device and everything worked out.

I installed the linux-wlan-ng package from Slackware's extra/ folder on the ftp server (make sure to match your kernel). After doing so, I put an alias in modules.conf for wlan0 to point to prism2_usb. I then plugged in the device and lsmod'ed it. Sure enough, the prism2 driver loaded correctly. Typing iwconfig at this point gave me "No wireless extensions", even for wlan0. I eventually found /etc/rc.d/rc.wlan (this appears automagically when you install linux-wlan-ng). I made it executable and ran (as root)

/etc/rc.d/rc.wlan start

And the device picked up as a wireless interface with extensions. You can iwconfig (for SSID/WEP/etc) and dhcpcd from there.

This was done with Slackware 10 and Pat's 2.6 kernel build. That's pretty good for out of the box working. Now to get hotplug to do this automatically...

With the 2.6 kernel you'll probably have to toss the kernel module into /etc/rc.d/rc.netdevice then add something like this to /etc/rc.d/rc.inet2

Then just make sure rc.wlan is chmod 750 and that should just about do it.

One question I have is right now my linux box is my wired gateway/firewall, what I would like to do is also turn it into an Access Point. I currently have a Linksys Wireless Router to do this, but It would be nice to integrate this into my box and also be able to use IPTables for way more flexability. Im curious if anybody has any expereince with this and since im going to be an AP, should I need a wifi adapter thats larger than a pen drive, perhaps one of the PCI adapters with the large antenna? If so which one. Thanks

I've used Linksys WPC11 ver. 3 and currently a Netgear MA401, I chose to stay with the Prism 2 chipset since it is plug and play (plus my iwconfig commands to get on my network). A list that would be good to follow is http://www.linux-wlan.org/docs/wlan_adapters.html.gz since the linux-wlan-ng comes with slack :)

EDIT: Also, I got my MA401 for 30 bucks brand new on Ebay, and I'd stay away from WPC11 unless you know its not version 4 chipset....

You will want host_ap then. http://hostap.epitest.fi/ If you want to go PCI don't get any of the current linksys cards. They do not work. I think the current d-link cards do, but I am not positive. I have an older Linksys WMP-11 I got to work as an AP after some effort. When on the go, or doing demos, I use a AmbiCom WL1100C-CF compact flash adapter as my Access point.

It's been covered here, but I'm also running the Linksys WPC11 Version 3 on Slackware 10.0. I'm running the 2.4.26 kernel, and I patched the Orinoco drivers, instead of using the wlan ones. I had this card in a Mandrake 9.1 setup using the wlan drivers, and it ran just fine as well. But be warned, I have heard that the new Version 4 card is hard to get working.

Yes it is. Just go to the wireless networking forum here. There is a thread several hundred posts long on getting it to run. You can get it to work with a nasty hack, but I don't think some of the cool tools will work with it.