Re: [gentoo-user] Which wireless cardbus?

[Stroller <stroller@stellar.eclipse.co.uk>]

On 18 Feb 2007, at 23:19, Mick wrote:
> ... I am trying to
> find out which WiFi cardbus to buy for my laptop.  I didn't have  
> much joy
> with a Belkin and would like to get a card which has a chipset that is
> supported well in Linux.
>
> Which chipsets have the more mature drivers?

You don't state which model of Belkin you tried, but I can assure you  
that they do a "set" (USB, cardbus, PCI) of 802.11g cards that are  
excellently supported by the rt2500 drivers. These are excellent, are  
OSS & you can get them with `emerge rt2500`.

I've also used cards which use the prism54 & madwifi drivers, which  
both do "master mode" (for building a wireless access point or base- 
station under Linux) and are both excellent. Jean Tourrilhes' page at  
HP.com is quite up-to-date on the situation with the prism54 drivers,  
I think, and I've never seen a cardbus card using this chipset,  
anyway, but if you can get hold of a card that's well supported by  
prism54 then it's very easy to use and the driver is in the main  
kernel tree.

The Atheros chipset supported by madwifi is capable of doing 802.11a  
as well as b & g - not all cards do "a", but they're not too  
difficult to find. madwifi-ng is a little non-standard in the way you  
configure the card (so I guess it might not work so well with  
graphical wireless configuration utilities) but it offers some more  
advanced features (VAPs, or "virtual access-points" in master-mode,  
for instance, allow you to have WEP & unencrypted interfaces on the  
same card; hence with iptables you can set different firewall rules  
for ath0 & ath1).

<http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php?title=Hardware>
<http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility>
<http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/ 
Linux.Wireless.drivers.802.11ag.html#Prism54>

I recommend this card, but if you're outside the UK contact in  
advance regarding shipping:
<http://networkned.co.uk/Belkin_Cardbus.php>
FULL DISCLOSURE: I am involved with this supplier.

Stroller.

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