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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?"
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
But in hindsight I should have used OpenBSD, just forgot to get the bloody CD's out.
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.
Bull. The Ralink chipset has nice Linux drivers (the old ones were derived from the same source base as the Windows drivers, but the rewrite is so much better - and well supported), as well as any Atheros card. Prism cards are well-supported, and rtl8180 cards will work (when you figure out what order you do crap in. :) )
:)
Centrino you mentioned already has excellent Linux support.
The ACX1xx, as well as a few other obscure chipsets, have Linux support, but it's spotty.
The moral is, there are chipsets with good support, even though there are also some with really bad support.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
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'.
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.
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).
Best part was I got it at Best Buy on sale about a year ago for $20 bucks. If I remember there's a pretty good list up on the prism drivers download site, just google for that and it'll tell you what cards work with it.
-=JML=-
Granted. Here is a list of Ralink cards.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
I really like wifi-radar.
http://www.bitbuilder.com/wifi_radar/
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
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.
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.
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.