Published at LXer:

Jeff Garzik offered an interesting status summary on the current state of Wireless drivers in the Linux Kernel. He begins, "another banner year has passed, with Linux once again proving its superiority in the area of crappy wireless (WiFi) support. Linux oldsters love the current state of wireless, because it hearkens back to the heady days of Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik and Linux kernel 0.99, when getting hardware to work under Linux required either engineering knowledge or luck (or both)."Jeff pointed out that there's still a need for an official wireless maintainer, "I'm just the defacto guy, with no interest in the job." He also noted the importance of finally picking a stack [story] and sticking with it, rather than continually coming up with new stacks. He continued on to suggest that this stack and all the wireless drivers should be maintained in the kernel tree, rather than externally as is common now, "the whole point of working in-tree, the whole point of this open source thing is that everybody works on the same code, and the entire Internet is your test bed. Quality improves the more people work together." He concluded that while things are rough now, there's still hope for the future.

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Hi. I'm planning to buy a laptop soon -my first laptop ever, after being in computers for more than 15 years, hehe.

Of course I'd like to use Linux on the laptop and connect via wireless to my home network.

Which are the models of wireless cards recommended for Linux, or better, which are the ones that are detected and installed automatically during os install or boot?

I could choose any flavor of Linux if needed (Fedora, SUSE, etc.)

At this point I have a machine running Fedora Core 5 w/ a D-Link DWL520. I know the wireless card is not detected automatically.

Best regards

http://linux-wless.passys.nl/index.php

It's not unlikely that a card won't work "out of the box," but if it's green on that list, it WILL work.