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State of WLAN Support on Linux?

Posted by Cliff on from the plug-and-play? dept.

ntropic asks: "I/ve recently bought a Belkin 802.11G USB adapter and was dismayed to find, after a few hours of struggling with it, that there seems to be no one who has managed to get it working under Linux. During the search for clues, it seemed that sum total of Linux support for wireless networking are the linux-wlan project, and the linuxant wrappers for Windows drivers. The former seems to support only Prism chipsets while the latter is a commercial solution, albeit quite an inexpensive one. Is that all, or are there better sources for wireless networking support?"

1 of 608 comments (clear)

  1. what I just went through the last few days.... by whitroth · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    On a contract, the motel only has wireless. I'd bought my base system....

    Anywhoo, I tried buying a wireless router, hoping I could plug my NIC into it, and set it as a router/access point. The end of that was when I called LinkSys, and they said "you can't do it that way."

    So I got a PCI card. D-Link. My old RH9 didn't recognize it, so I booted up the live DVD of SuSE 10. It didn't know it, either. I called D-Link, and after several go-'rounds, "tech support" told me to call "pre-purchase support" during business hours, since "tech support" didn't know what chipset they used.

    Right.

    Called a friend, who told me it was probably an Atheros, and the driver I was looking for was ath_pci. He also said that someone else online had been moaning about the madwifi drivers not working well....

    Except, online, you *really* need to figure out just how old such a moan is. I moused around down in /lib/2.blah, and, lo and behold, there was the driver, under extras/.

    modprobe ath_pci, and SuSE recognized the card, let me configure it, and voila, online, with no trouble.

    Um, except for a brand new, clone, optical mouse that SuSE Could. Not. Figure. Out. (as in, it turned off the led so hard, I had to power cycle the box).

    So, with no mouse, I tried to do Webmail, with the version of Firefox on SuSE 10. It's not "merely* aggressive about blocking popups, it REFUSES TO ADMIT THAT I TOLD IT TO A) STOP BLOCKING THEM FROM THE WEBMAIL SITE, AND B) STOP BLOCKING THEM *ALL*.

    And when it blocks the popup compose window, IT DOESN'T LET YOU TAB TO THE "CLICK HERE" TO OPEN THE WINDOW.

                mark, not happy with Firefox 1.0.6, but happy to *finally* be back online....