[LBo] wireless choices

[Anita Lewis]

On 08/19/2007 07:59 PM Gregg Nicholas wrote:

> 
> Since this group is about Questions and Answers, I'd like to put a 
> question to the group as a whole:
> What wireless hardware have you personally used that required very 
> little tweaking?

Gregg, I agree that wifi is frustrating.  My big complaint is the change
of chips on cards and not being able to find out what the chip is with
what I'm about to buy.  You can find out with a database what the chips
are on a card, but when you look to buy it, you either can no longer
find it or the version number is higher and not listed on the database
because the card is too new.  Then you ask the company from which you
are buying the thing and they don't know what chip.

Laptop: Was Orinocco Gold in old laptop.  Out of the box works with
everything. The driver is a kernel module for ages now.  Current is
Intel 802.11 abg on a System76.com Darter.  I'm pretty sure there is no
special driver added by them, but I did get the machine with Ubuntu
installed.

Desktop: Had a nice Atheros chip card working with restricted driver,
madwifi (old version) in Ubuntu Dapper and numerous other distros.
Upgraded to Edgy and then Feisty and lost wifi due, it seems, to the new
version of madwifi not working with my card.  I did a lot of
troubleshooting on the madwifi list with developers and no resolution.

Checked database for Ralink chip card.  D-Link Wireless G, DWL-G510 fit
the bill.  I bought it and got another Atheros chip because the version
was higher than the one in the database. Of course it was exactly the
same Atheros chipset and did not work.  I switched to ndiswrapper and it
is fine.

There is a possibility that my Atheros problem is something to do with
the router that I connect to. It is not my router; so I cannot
investigate.  And yes, the owner knows I use it and said I could. :-)

Anita



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