Re: wireless network card

[Jon Dowland <lists@alcopop.org>]

At 1153696655 past the epoch, Faheem Mitha wrote:
> I've been trying to find locally a wireless network card
> that works with Linux to install on my host's laptop. The
> cards available at the local retail outlets seem to only
> work with proprietary drivers, and I don't want to use
> proprietary drivers for such a basic thing.

I have used two wireless cards in my laptop.

1. A Linksys WPC11 PC-card, supporting 10Mb/s (802.11b).
   This turned out to be a 'v.4' although there was no
   indication of this on the packaging or in the description
   provided by the online vendor.

   The 'v.4' means it has a rtl8180 chipset and can be used
   with the fully GPL driver available from
   <http://rtl8180-sa2400.sourceforge.net/>.

   I can't remember what chipset the pre-v4 cards had, but I
   believe it was one which was supported by an open source
   driver too (possibly the prism or prism2).

2. An intel pro-wireless 802.11g mini-pci card. This has a
   GPL driver <http://ipw2200.sf.net/> which is included in
   the current mainline kernels (I can't remember when it
   was actually added). There's a debian package for this
   driver.

   Note that this driver is open source *BUT* you need
   non-free binary firmware to actually use the card.

> The important thing is that I should be able to pick it up
> locally.

I think both of these are relatively common cards but I have
no idea what kind of hardware stores you have around there.

-- 
Jon Dowland
http://alcopop.org/