Hello *,
last week I experimented with WLAN PCMCIA cards on my Dell Latitude
CS400XT running 2.6.10.
First I bought a Netgear WG 511 (54Mbit/s) which is reported to work
properly using the native Linux driver for Prism chipsets. As it did not
work at all, I did some research on the web and found out that new cards
use a reduced chipset - the driver developers refer to it as SoftMAC as
opposed to HardMAC - which is more like a Winmodem in that it requires
heavy support by the CPU. Despite the severe change in implementation,
Netgear did not change the card's identifier s.t. hotplug identifies it a
as prism card and tries to load the prism driver. It seems that all
Netgear cards "Made in China" have this problem and that in Germany only
those cards are being sold at the moment. So hands off - also if you plan
to use it with an older Windows machine because of the heavy CPU load the
driver causes. I returned this card.