Re: Debian and wireless network cards
On Thursday 21 July 2005 19:06, Leonid Grinberg wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I was asked by a friend to install Debian on his system. He asked me
> about which wireless network cards Debian supports. Can anybody tell
> me which ones (I personally don't use a wireless network so I wouldn't
> know).
>
> Thanks,
> Leonid Grinberg
Leonid,
Two cards have worked for me: 1. SMC EX Connect G Mod# SMC2835W it uses the
Prism54 driver which is in 2.6 series kernel, you need to download the
"Firmware" (a file the tells the card how to work) and put it
in /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware ( see http://prism54.org/~mcgrof/firmware/ and
www.prism54.org )
2. Orinoco gold 11b/g PC card Mod# 8470-FC . This card is by far the better
of the two in that it allows you to use WPA if you need it. Both use WEP.
The Orinoco uses Atheros drivers and is slightly harder to install. see
http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi/, http://madwifi.sourceforge.net/,
the best "up and running" instructions are http://www.madwifi.net/. You will
need to have a dev. environment set up (gcc, debhelper, sysutils, and a few
more I don't remember) But don't dispare! on irc Freenode server #madwifi
channel you can get friendly help. It all is realy easy, but time consuming
the first time and requires a kernel compile or kernel headers installed.
I hope that helps. Yes it all is very hard to get info on wireless. But that
is becuse of the MFG all just change the chipset on the fly and don't bother
to change the model numbers. That and the drivers are protected IP (such as
the Prism54 family) and have to be backwards engineered.
Addendium: Omitted the first time:
The Orinoco goes by the name of Proxim and can be purchased online. To use
WPA I advise you apt-getting wpasupplicant.
Read /usr/share/doc/wpasupplicant to set it up. Once again, it is easy, but
you have to read.
--
Damon L. Chesser
damon@damtek.com
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