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Well, it's kind of a pain to find out what the chipsets are from the Best Buy website, so I'm not going to go through them all. Here is a list of all the chipsets supported by the madwifi driver in linux. If you get a card with one of these chipsets, it should work out of the box. But, you are going to have to verify that the card you are buying has the right chipset. Sometimes this means going to the manufacterer's website because the retailer doesn't always give you that information. Like another replier already said, it looks like D-link will be your best shot. But, again, verify the chipset before you buy anything.

I did research into third party usb ralink drivers for OS X while trying to upgrade from B to G Wireless. A list of devices using this chipset is at http://ralink.rapla.net/ None of the companies offer Mac OSX drivers, but the chipset manufacturer does. It appears to be trivial to implement. I assume muscle was applied to third parties not to release drivers to compete with "Airport" branded devices.
I think Apple does interferes with development of third party hardware. Not just the OS, and not just for "Quality Control" reasons. There is a relationship between maintaining strict control and hardware quality, but there is also a relationship between control, maximizing profit, and taking advantage of customers' blissful ignorance.

My ongoing gripe with Google is the number of times when the first page is filled with shopping sites, "review" pages, and click through pages

Then create your own Google Custom Search Engine or use some existing ones such as Google Search Excluding Shops that's excluding hand picked 700+ shopping and spam sites and gives ranking boost to 160+ websites of IT and other electronics companies.

Certainly, Ralink, Realtek, Atmel (to some degree) and ZyDAS (no longer a company of its own) are the good guys among wireless chip manufacturers.

In order to be able to vote with one's wallet (or credit card), one needs to get to know who are the good guys among device manufacturers as well (namely which chips are inside the various wireless devices).

Here are some links to support these decisions:

Devices using Ralink chipsets
http://ralink.rapla.net/

Devices using Realtek chipsets
http://realtek.rapla.net/

Devices using ZyDAS chipsets (mostly external "stick type" USB devices)
http://zydas.rapla.net/

Beware of those manufacturers who routinely change chipsets without changing a device's name or model number!

Btw.: It might be worth noting that ZyDAS has been acquired by Atheros earlier this year. The open ZyDAS drivers are still available. They have been moved (e.g. for the popular ZD1211B chipset) to

http://www.atheros.com/RD/ZyDAS/web_driver/ZD1211B /

Regards,

Walter.

Certainly, Ralink, Realtek, Atmel (to some degree) and ZyDAS (no longer a company of its own) are the good guys among wireless chip manufacturers.

In order to be able to vote with one's wallet (or credit card), one needs to get to know who are the good guys among device manufacturers as well (namely which chips are inside the various wireless devices).

Here are some links to support these decisions:

Devices using Ralink chipsets
http://ralink.rapla.net/

Devices using Realtek chipsets
http://realtek.rapla.net/

Devices using ZyDAS chipsets (mostly external "stick type" USB devices)
http://zydas.rapla.net/

Beware of those manufacturers who routinely change chipsets without changing a device's name or model number!

Btw.: It might be worth noting that ZyDAS has been acquired by Atheros earlier this year. The open ZyDAS drivers are still available. They have been moved (e.g. for the popular ZD1211B chipset) to

http://www.atheros.com/RD/ZyDAS/web_driver/ZD1211B /

Regards,

Walter.

Certainly, Ralink, Realtek, Atmel (to some degree) and ZyDAS (no longer a company of its own) are the good guys among wireless chip manufacturers.

In order to be able to vote with one's wallet (or credit card), one needs to get to know who are the good guys among device manufacturers as well (namely which chips are inside the various wireless devices).

Here are some links to support these decisions:

Devices using Ralink chipsets
http://ralink.rapla.net/

Devices using Realtek chipsets
http://realtek.rapla.net/

Devices using ZyDAS chipsets (mostly external "stick type" USB devices)
http://zydas.rapla.net/

Beware of those manufacturers who routinely change chipsets without changing a device's name or model number!

Btw.: It might be worth noting that ZyDAS has been acquired by Atheros earlier this year. The open ZyDAS drivers are still available. They have been moved (e.g. for the popular ZD1211B chipset) to

http://www.atheros.com/RD/ZyDAS/web_driver/ZD1211B /

Regards,

Walter.

Not very accurate, instead you could use manually tuned Google based Search Excluding Shops that cleans up the first page of search results so that crappy shopping and spam sites aren't listed.

No one buys a wireless adapter for a Mac laptop, because they all come with one. Not true. A couple of months ago I was asked by some starving-student acquaintances to help them set up wifi in their apartment. They had two older PowerBooks neither of which had wireless of any sort built into them. Faced with spending either $20 x 2 (on sale at Fry's) for USB adapters with an ralink rt2500 chipset and a c.$70 Linksys-WRT54G router versus c.$80 x 2 (now reduced to $50)for the apple brand cards and c.$200 for the Airport Extreme Base Station they decided to save the money and go with the $250 cheaper solution. Yes, the PowerBooks were "Airport Extreme Ready", but all that means is that they have the antenna built into the casing and a space inside for the card. I wouldn't mind betting there are quite a few people in a similar situation. I'm hoping that it's not the rt2500 driver that's compromised... that would suck as ralink have been pretty good about releasing open drivers.

This can be sent by an RT2500 wireless card.

Are those still widely available, or have manufacturers moved on to other chipsets (as denoted by the * in the master list)? And doesn't WMB as we know it require a PCI card, meaning that if all of my PC's PCI slots are full I have to buy another PC?

You are right, Broadcom is one of the least "open-minded" wireless (54) chipset manufacturers.

On the opposite end of the scale, there are Ralink, ZyDAS, and Realtek.

For a reference which chipset is being used in which wireless (54) device, see

http://ralink.rapla.net/
http://zydas.rapla.net/ (mostly USB wireless devices)
http://realtek.rapla.net/

Ralink earns some extra points here for being implemented in a wide variety of devices, like CardBus, MiniPCI and USB wireless, as well as making their own open source drivers available (the latter is true for ZyDAS and Realtek as well).

From any of these URLs, you can reach similar pages for the "lower end" companies, like Conexant and even Broadcom.

Regards,

Walter.

You are right, Broadcom is one of the least "open-minded" wireless (54) chipset manufacturers.

On the opposite end of the scale, there are Ralink, ZyDAS, and Realtek.

For a reference which chipset is being used in which wireless (54) device, see

http://ralink.rapla.net/
http://zydas.rapla.net/ (mostly USB wireless devices)
http://realtek.rapla.net/

Ralink earns some extra points here for being implemented in a wide variety of devices, like CardBus, MiniPCI and USB wireless, as well as making their own open source drivers available (the latter is true for ZyDAS and Realtek as well).

From any of these URLs, you can reach similar pages for the "lower end" companies, like Conexant and even Broadcom.

Regards,

Walter.

You are right, Broadcom is one of the least "open-minded" wireless (54) chipset manufacturers.

On the opposite end of the scale, there are Ralink, ZyDAS, and Realtek.

For a reference which chipset is being used in which wireless (54) device, see

http://ralink.rapla.net/
http://zydas.rapla.net/ (mostly USB wireless devices)
http://realtek.rapla.net/

Ralink earns some extra points here for being implemented in a wide variety of devices, like CardBus, MiniPCI and USB wireless, as well as making their own open source drivers available (the latter is true for ZyDAS and Realtek as well).

From any of these URLs, you can reach similar pages for the "lower end" companies, like Conexant and even Broadcom.

Regards,

Walter.

You mean, "with Linux (x86)"? Hacks are not the solution in the long term. We need open drivers, and at least freely distributable firmware files (if not open ones because of regulation).

Of the 802.11g hardware (pci/usb/pcmcia), Symbol, Zydas and Atmel allow firmware distribution with okay terms, people should support them. Also, Ralink, Atheros and Realtek have cards that do not require the firmware to be distributed. Intel, TI, Conexant and Broadcom should be boycotted for their stupid policies of not allowing eg. Linux distributions or BSDs to distribute the firmware files without specific agreement (which they can choose not to make). Yes, even Intel though it has nice drivers otherwise.

Driver situation varies, but as pointed out eg. RT2500-based cards (see http://ralink.rapla.net/) are a good choice, as are probably Atheros-based cards (madwifi) and Atmel-based cards. Zydas drivers, even though GPL, have been unstable for long, even though there are both a manufacturer-provided GPL driver and a community-supported one - the co-operation just hasn't been fluent until perhaps now.

And it has to be remembered, that even the freely distributable firmware file is not currently the optimal solution, because it's a binary blob with no source and there are no rights to modify it. But perhaps we just have to live with a few "restricted" blobs (like the terminology in Ubuntu) when it comes to the hardware firmwares - our graphics cards also have closed firmwares etc. At least a device firmware is a lesser threat to freedom than closed drivers like the binary graphics drivers.

Ralink is a company which manufactures the chipsets for dozens of popular 802.11x devices. They do indeed provide drivers (and source) for linux:

http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm

they also provide a nice table, with links to the manufacturers

http://ralink.rapla.net/

AND they have an open source project, as well, to support the drivers!

http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page

check it out. it's cool.

Which one? The Belkin F5D7050 has GPL drivers from the chipset manufacturer for Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows.

http://ralink.rapla.net/

Granted. Here is a list of Ralink cards.

List of brand/model numbers with the chipset: http://ralink.rapla.net

RALink's own GPL linux driver here.

Further development of RALink's codebase here.

There are loads of Ralink-based devices around... In .uk, of the PCI cards, you'll probably have most luck finding MSI PC54G2 and Gigabyte GN-WPKG. Double-check the chipset if that's possible, since it seems quite a few manufacturers are now switching to Marvell.

There is an open source project which is developing the ralink drivers further, see http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page. And yes, the driver works on 2.6 too, although it's not merged.

I recently bought an A-link WL54H PCI card (about 30 EUR), which has the rt2500 chip. See http://ralink.rapla.net/ for a big list of devices with the rt2500 chip.

Oh, and you'll want the drivers :-)