Wireless Cards and Linux

punkrockguy318 · 2004-08-03 19:23:14

What are some wireless cards that play nice with linux? Something that works out of the box for most distros and Arch? This freaking belkin card isn't working, I'm going to sell it on eBay... Any suggestions?

famavolat · 2004-08-03 21:15:56

After recently playing with this myself I actually have some answers... your best bet is to get a wireless card that works with the linux-wlan-ng driver. This page gives you a list of PCMCIA, USB and PCI cards that work with the driver. I got a D-Link DWL-122 802.11b 11 Mbps USB Adapter... after you find an adapter that you like (and works) the key is configuring it.

First of course you want to find the driver that works with your adapter out of the linux-wlan-ng set. My usb D-Link works with the prism2_usb module (driver). Reading the readme helps alot when trying to configure your card. So depending on if your card is USB or PCMCIA you will first have to modprobe your USB or PCMCIA module and then modprobe the corresponding linux-wlan-ng driver.

Example:

modprobe uhci_hcd
modprobe prism2_usb
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_ifstate ifstate=enable
wlanctl-ng wlan0 lnxreq_autojoin ssid=<your routers SSID name> authtype=opensystem
dhcpcd wlan0

To get all the packages you need:

pacman -S wireless_tools wlan-ng26 (or wlan-ng24 for 2.4 kernel)
and pcmcia-cs package for PCMCIA cards

All of this will get you started with using a wireless card, but each time you reboot your machine you will lose your network info. So what you probably want to do is use a init script to startup each time you boot. There is a wlan script that comes with these packages located at /etc/rc.d/wlan

I hope this helps!

punkrockguy318 · 2004-08-04 14:31:35

That's just what I needed! Thanks!

dtw · 2004-08-04 15:00:15

i have a netgear ma401 which is straight out the box as well - they're pretty cheap now

Arch Linux

#1 2004-08-03 19:23:14

Wireless Cards and Linux

#2 2004-08-03 21:15:56

Re: Wireless Cards and Linux

#3 2004-08-04 14:31:35

Re: Wireless Cards and Linux

#4 2004-08-04 15:00:15

Re: Wireless Cards and Linux

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