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?"

Comments

Actually

[Punboy]

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.

Re:Actually

[dan_bethe]

Yeah no kidding. Has anyone who's complaining about suboptimal hardware support on a free OS, ever tried designing (in other words, reverse engineering) a device driver or abstraction layer for an OS? Get to the freaking point and just ask which cards are best supported, assuming you can't read the docs yourselves.

How do they think a developer of free wifi would feel if they were reading this public display of bleating and humiliation? Such a developer would by definition have spent years of their lives devoting tons of free time to a labor of love and of liberty. If it was me, I'd be pretty insulted if not humiliated. Hopefully they'd have thick skin and say "yeah I know I don't like it either" or even just "whatever; you're welcome to fix it" but they're under no obligation to sympathize any further. Free device driver developers, especially those in wifi, are some hard working, state-of-the-art people who are substantially increasing our liberties. If you're not part of their solution, you're part of the problem.

me too!!

[lubricated]

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.

Re:me too!!

[rincebrain]

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. :)

Orinoco-based

[SocialEngineer]

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.

Ask the Oracle

[Matt Perry]

Clearly you asked the wrong Oracle.

Use an HCL

[Burz]

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'.

Atheros / MADWIFI

[ThatComputerGuy]

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.

Lists of compatible cards

[Sits]

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.