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802.11 for Linux Non-Geeks?
smanuel asks: "I'm in the process of helping my
non-geek friend get his Linux box set up with a PCI wireless card.
2006 is fast approaching and Linux *still* has spotty support
for 802.11a/b/g PCI and PCMCIA cards. Ask the The
Oracle about wireless for Linux and the results aren't much
better. There are a ton of cards to choose from but support is either
spotty or requires such contortions that I'm wary of spending the
time. What PCI/PCMCIA cards do fellow Slashdot readers recommend? I'm
looking for both PCI and PCMCIA cards; preferably ones with native
support in Linux (I'm trying to avoid ndis{c,w}rapper if I can). Is
the fact that card manufacturers change chipsets more often than they
underpants make this a never ending problem?"
Its not that Linux doesn't support the cards, its that the card vendors don't support linux. If they were smart they'd supply linux drivers, or follow a standard that allows current drivers to work with their cards.
If you like what I've said here, and want to read more, go to http://www.krillrblog.com
This is the my biggest beef with linux support for wireless. I haven't found an 802.11g chipset that works reliably. I would purchase one this instant(I'm not kidding, I'll go straight to newegg or bestbuy) if I knew it worked, perfectly. All the cards have their quirks and the support is almost a joke. After twisting yourself into contortions it might work. That said the only card that I've had consistent success with has been the centrino chipset. Too bad these only come on intel laptops and not as a pci/pcmcia card.
I have a pheobe usb wireless that mostly works(atmel chipset). It only supports 802.11b(hardware limitation) and it can't do a scan for networks while connected to one, this really fucks up wifi-radar.
I had an orinico pcmcia card by smc. Very nice card, unfortunately it had a very flimsy plastic antena that broke when my cat stepped on it. Scanning did not work at all, so if I wanted to connect to a network, I had to guess the essid.
I also had a linksys pcmcia card. I forgot the name but it was one of those where earlier versions worked fine but the newest version had a different chipset even though the model name remained the same. This was a piece of shit card under any os. Though it mostly didn't work under linux.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
The RTL8180 is a pretty infamous card that now has native support after years of Realtek jerking us around with drivers that worked on 2.4.24 kernel or below. Of course the old orinico and prism chipsets work well, but 802.11g native support seems to be lacking a lot more than b. There's a chipset called RALINK or something or another that is open sourced.
The big problem is that the card makers will change chipsets at the drop of a hat and it can be next to impossible to find out what chipset its actually using - even if you know the revision and everything. I remember one card where there was the same version, but some were made in taiwan and some were made in china and only the chinese cards had the proper chipset.
It's a real mess. I probably spent 3 hours one night doing research and had my choices narrowed down when I happened to pop in a kanotix live cd and lo and behold it picked up my card without ndiswrapper or anything. So I'm happy for now, even though its just a 802.11b card. And then of course you've got the whole frequency regulation crap where manufacturers can't even open source if they want to.
That is the biggest question. I have a builtin 801.11b in my laptop that uses the orinoco_pci, orinoco, and hermes modules, and a card that uses the rt2500 module. EVERY distribution I've tried in the past year has been able to use both cards. Ubuntu configured my wireless on the install (had to manually install before breezy came out). Gentoo I had to "emerge rt2500". If you have any idea what card you want, just search the forums for the distro you are going to run beforehand, you should find out pretty quickly if you have a hassle or not ahead of you.
Since when was 'underpants' a verb?
Max.
I've been using an orinoco-based Enterasys Roamabout DS for quite a while now, and am pretty satisfied with it. No issues getting it working, and Kismet works well with it. I just plug it in and go.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Clearly you asked the wrong Oracle.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
But in hindsight I should have used OpenBSD, just forgot to get the bloody CD's out.
Can't you just run linux on your laptop under VMWare?
You have to find the ARM firmware and put it in the right place, but some of these cards will work...
http://www.netgear.com/products/details/WG511.php
Buy it someplace where you can return it.
... go with Ubuntu. (If that's an option). I've had absolutely no trouble with my installation: it picked up my D-Link DWL-G250 (a g card) and all I had to supply was the SSID and network key; it worked beautifully from the get-go. Just my 2 cents.
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
The best Hardware Compatability List for Linux that I've seen is here:
http://www.linuxquestions.org/hcl/index.php
It could be better (it HAS to get better) but I did get some useful modem purchasing info from it.
You are wise to inquire about Linux compatability before buying components for your 'industry standard x86 platform'.
I'd reccomend Motorola... thats what I use... it does require NDISwrapper, but it uses the standard broadcom driver and sets up in like five minutes.
Linux *still* has spotty support for 802.11a/b/g PCI and PCMCIA cards
Definitely. Maybe if your essid is default and your network is wide open, its easy to use.
Linux wireless gets shot down by the simplicity of XP SP2's config interface, and other things (xsupplicant STILL DOES NOT WORK WITH A PEAP/MSCHAP NETWORK I HAVE TO USE, so I had to buy the Aegis client from Meetinghouse). I hear cries from the KDE crowd about KWirelessSomething (don't remember). That utility is crud.
Its approaching 2006 and my Prism2.5 card STILL doesn't do scanning. I only found out about my neighbours wireless network by booting into Windows. Pathetic. In fact, to add insult to injury, the laptop I'm using to type this is approaching its 3 year EOL.
Prism series chipsets seem to have the best reputation, using a Prism2.5 card right now. Prism54 cards, however, seem to be getting really hard to obtain, and now there is a new breed without Linux drivers (for the moment) too. Pity Intersil sold that thing.
I grabbed a WG311 thinking it was a v1 with the atheros chipset, and realized I had a v2 after I had mailed off the rebates. I got screwed. There might be support for it soon from acx100.sf.net, but for now there is no acx111 support that anyone will but their name on without a beta tacked on it too.
My laptop has an excellent intel ipw2200 chipset (B+G) and the ipw2100 is supported as well. Intel makes a pci version too, though it is hard to find.
My desktop has a netgear WPN311 with an athereos chipset, which works with the madwifi driver.
Check out ioquake3.org for a great, free, First-Person Shooter engine!
D-Link DWL-G630 (ver.D1) + Ubuntu work fine out of box. But WPA support is tricky. You have to install wpa_supplicant and configure it.
I'm using Ubuntu Breezy with an Intel 802.11g card, and it works just fine - it worked out of the box with no tuning on my part. AFAIK most old 802.11b cards Just Work - the problem comes when you go to 802.11g; there you want to avoid Broadcomm, since drivers for Broadcomm chipsets on Linux are spotty. I don't know why the Intel is better, but for whatever reason, it is (I'm sure there is a reason - I just don't follow those drivers very closely).
You may run into trouble when you are in a situation where there's more than one network. NetworkManager should take care of that, but it's bleeding edge right now. You can select networks from the command line, and there are widgets for selecting the network in Kde and Gtk which do seem to work, but the UI isn't very easy to use yet. NM should be easier; stay tuned.
The Atheros based cards are great. D-Link sells a DWL-G650 PCMCIA card and a DWL-G520 PCI card, both using Atheros chipsets, for around $45 ($30-35 on sale usually). The Madwifi project supports these at http://madwifi.sf.net/, and the driver supports the use of wpa_supplicant for WPA.
I use these cards myself and have recommended them to many people, and almost all of them are happy with the results. (The one that isn't apparently got a bad card and is too lazy to exchange it.)
The other thing that helps here is the fact that D-Link doesn't change chipsets in the middle of a product line like other crappy brands (at least, not in _this_ line).
If you're biased against D-Link for some reason, Atheros also has a great list of manufacturers/products that use their chipsets - this is something every chipset manufacturer should have on their page.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
My biggest problem was to know in advance what I'd buy. Most cards don't come with chipset specifications, and - like with webcams - vendors like to change chipsets between different versions.
So, I bought a Linksys Wireless-G USB, thinking it is a Prism2 chipset which is well supported and has RFMON. It turned out, version 4 has a Ralink chipset which seems not to work flawlessy with ndiswrapper.
Fortunately, these great guys at rt2x00.serialmonkey.com have native driver that supports RFMON and native linux wireless extensions (unlike linux-wlan-ng that is... mmhmm... different). So far the drivers are quite stable and I'm hoping they will improve the remaining glitches (like setting a new MAC address).
Ralink manufactures chipsets for wireless cards and supplies GPL source code for drivers under Linux. I have an A-Link 802.11g card and it has pretty good support with newer distributions.
Don't buy a card with a broadcom chipset.
I recommend the Orinico Gold cards
I've had some luck with the Netgear WG511 and Fedora Core 4. The prism54 driver is built into the current kernels. The only thing required is the firmware (which is easily found on the net) and copy it into /lib/firmware
I've set up two computers with two different wireless NICs using ndiswrapper, and have had success with both. One was a laptop using D-Link's DWL-G630 802.11g card, and the other was a desktop using the Linksys WMP54G 802.11g PCI card. Using ndiswrapper isn't as perfect as a native driver, but it works well, so I'm not complaining. For the D-Link card, I documented my process here, and the same general process works for the Linksys card as well. The process is for Fedora Core 3 because at the time I wrote that, I couldn't get it to work with Fedora Core 4, but since that time I believe it's now possible. Greg
I'm amazed you haven't come across the linux wlan chipset list. Although it hasn't been updated for nearly two years it's about the most exhaustive list of what is in each card that I've seen. If 802.11b is fine then there are still Prism 2.5/3 based cards out there that work very well. I also recently tested a Atheros based PCMCIA card (I'm purposely not naming manufacturers) which also worked well but required a small binary lump.
As mentioned elsewhere, support for wifi isn't spotty - it's support for certain chipsets that is (alas this is also extends to various USB wifi devices too). If you buy (for example) a Broadcom based card I'm afraid you're in for a rough ride because Broadcom don't want to release open source drivers. There's no point getting upset - Broadcom are within their rights to do so and Linux isn't binary only friendly. It's the way things are.
The best advice I can give is get a peek inside the box so you know which chipset you are buying. Manufacturers are lazy and try to avoid changing model numbers significantly even if they swap chipsets because it means all the other materials can stay exactly the same. If you are going on someone else's information be extremly weary of ANY deviation to the model name/number/revison. Things like a +, extra letters or revision increase of any amount can mean chipset changes.
This was one of my biggest gripes for a long time. It isn't completely fixed, but it is pretty darn good.
Though others may have mentioned NDISWrapper, which is a neat little hack which recreates the windows environment for the wireless card. So you can use Windows drivers with it. This is a little tricky to implement, unless you use a distro that does it automatically. I know Mepis and Ubuntu do it, and I've heard SuSE does too. Give one of those a shot. If you want to do it with a different distro check this site
Otherwise wikipedia has a pretty good list of hardware that plays nice with linux.
Any comments on the CNET CWP-854 which I've seen sold as a "linux solution"?
I want something native (no ndiswrapper), and stable... with WPA.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I have a Netgear WG511T that works great on all Linux distributions that I've tried it with. Some, like Ubuntu, even detect it and set it up automatically upon plugging it in. For all other distros, you'll have to install the madwifi drivers. These drivers support b and g, but not the speedboost mode or whatever its called that only works with other similarly-enabled Netgear cards and routers.
Take a look at the madwifi drivers http://www.madwifi.org/>, The've been stable for months, and they allow running to act as an Access Point.
Hey, I've got a Prism chipset and it works like a charm, right out of the box, it's one of Linksys's WPC's, version three to be exact, which runs either Prism2.5 or Prism3 chipset, and that's the wireless card that I use when I want something to work out of the box. Other than that, ndiswrapper is relatively simple to use, and supports the widely-used Broadcom chipset under most platforms. But if you're looking for something that'll "just work" I suggest looking for a card with an older Prism chipset, it should work right out of the box for your friend...
I like suggestions, but I don't like contributing towards them.
As an OpenBSD user I can tell you that it does not have the broadest support. Let me back this counterclaim up.
OpenBSD supports the following chipsets (as taken from the OpenBSD i386 hardware compatibility page on 19th November 2005:
ADMtek, Aironet, Atheros, Atmel, Centrino (2100, 2200), Prism 2.5/3, Ralink (2500), Raytheon and Realtek
Now by comparison a Linux distro (e.g. Ubuntu) can have support for the following chipsets (list taken from Linux WLAN Howto cross referenced against Ubuntu) on 19th November 2005:
ADMtek, Aironet, Atheros, Atmel, Centrino (2100, 2200), Prism 2.5/3, Ralink (2400, 2500), Prism GT, Raytheon, Texas Instruments ACX100/110, Wavelan
A pretty similar list wouldn't you say (OpenBSD has Realtek which Ubuntu doesn't, Ubuntu has Ralink 2400, Prism GT, ACX100/110 and Wavelan which OpenBSD doesn't)? In fact, Linux has Realtek drivers too but as they aren't shipped in Ubuntu I left them off the list. Linux also has ndiswrapper and Linuxant Driverloader allowing the use of Win32 drivers but I'm discounting non native drivers.
Chipsets that aren't supported by either OS that are significant:
Broadcom - There's a heck of a lot of Broadcom stuff out there and no sign of open drivers ever. That's their perogative but this stuff is all over the place...
Marvel - a new 802.11g player as far as I can tell. No open source drivers that I know of so far.
For the meantime, chipsets like Broadcom mean that open source OSes will always have a more troublesome than Windows with random wireless drivers. Choose carefully and don't reward vendors with non free drivers where possible.
Prism 2.5/3 based cards have supported scanning for years on Linux BUT (there had to be a but becaues your experience is different right?) it depended on the driver (HostAP and linux-wlan had could by default, orinoco needed drivers). Since the 2.4.13 kernel the orinoco drivers have supported scanning in the mainstream Linux kernel without patches.
go to http://www.netgate.com/ select a miniPCI card (i like the 5004 MP Atheros 4G: 802.11a/b/g miniPCI Card), a PCI Adapter: miniPCI in a PCI Slot and finally the correct antenna and you will have a working solution for Linux, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. the solution will cost over $100 but WORK!!!
Real Feather on a 3-inch CD managed to setup this Compusa (rcmf-somenumber) wireless card on an aging Thinkpad 600. Down for the count: Mandrake Community 10.1 and (get this) Damn Small Linux, but probably a little more investigation is required. Damn Small is thinking it's an atmel, but I haven't trawled the depths of linux docs and driver HOWTOs for this one yet.
Am typing this though on Win95b.
I've been using the Linksys WMP54g PCI card on Debian Unstable with no problems. You need to make sure to get revision 4; apparently older revisions used a completely different chipset without free drivers. I believe that most stores would only stock rev 4 though. This card uses the rt2500 driver, which apparently isn't in the main kernel tree (at least as of 2.6.12; maybe it's been integrated in newer kernels?), so I had to use the module-assistant tool to add it to my installation. This isn't difficult, but it's probably not something a non-geek will want to do. Your distro may vary. ~Phillip
I am currenlty using an Compaq/HP NC4000 for work and built in Atheros WiFi adapter works fine. Speed and reliablity are as good, if not better than Windows. Configuration was handled very nicely by YaST. Works fine with Kismet and a few other similar utilities and is compable the our VPN requirements.
Additional techincal crap:
lscpi -v
0000:00:09.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)
Subsystem: Compaq Computer Corporation: Unknown device 00e5
Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 5
Memory at a0080000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
Capabilities: [44] Power Management version 2
lsmod (trimmed of excess crap):
ath_pci
ath_rate_onoe
wlan
ath_hal
wlan_wep
uname -a
Linux XXXX 2.6.11.4-21.9-default #1 Fri Aug 19 11:58:59 UTC 2005 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
Slightly customized kernel based on Suse 9.3
If VISTA is the answer, you didn't understand the question
If you check the beginning ofthe 2.6.14 changelog you will find mention of a "ieee80211 subsystem" being merged. So hopefully all drivers will be ported to the generic in kernel 802.11 stack. This will hopefully take over WPA crypto duties from drivers. This also goes hand in hand with version 28 of Wireless Tools which will provide a basic (but standard) interface for WPA.
Yes the *BSDs are further down this track as pointed out in another comment buy it's nice to see Linux catching up and I believe HostAP and the Centrino drivers have already been converted over to using the generic 802.11 stack.
The Personal Telco Project also has a good list of prism 2 cards, which are well supported in Linux by several different drivers (orinoco, wvlan_cs, host_ap). HostAP allows you to use your computer as an access point, though 'till recently you had to compile it separately.
You forgot to mention how good the range is with those. The Entarasys cards look like something out of the early '90s, but I've never seen a card that works better.
Given no support from the vendor, you'd have a lot more trouble getting a WiFi card working under Windows than under Linux. So go pester your favorite vendor for Linux drivers. Or get a supported card; my Cisco Aironet 350 has worked beautifully from day 1, so much so that I haven't had the need to upgrade it
I have tried to run both my Netgear cards WG511v1 and WG511v2 on Suse 9.3. Version one works pretty well as Suse has in built support for the prism chipset. Earlier, It wasnt working properly as i was using some other driver. I have used prism54s driver(http://prism54.org/ but failed. However, for the version 2 card having Marvel chipset i used ndiswrapper to get it working. Not to mention I tried using every other possibilites as well. Using Ndiswprapper was easy and no special configurations were required. All in all I would like to say for a user who is not well versed with linux. its difficult for him/her to follow. I would really like to divert the attention of companies like Netgear to provide driver support for Linux as well.