[clug] PCI WiFi cards

[David Cottrill]

For better or worse I've always had Ralink based cards and these days  
they also Just Work, though there can be issues if you want something  
more than just a wpa client.
David




On 21/06/2010, at 3:45 PM, Francis Whittle <fj.whittle at gmail.com> wrote:

> $ lspci -vs 3:6
> 03:06.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications Inc. Atheros  
> AR5001X
> + Wireless Network Adapter (rev 01)
>    Subsystem: D-Link System Inc D-Link AirPlus DWL-G520 Wireless PCI
> Adapter(rev.B)
>    Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 168, IRQ 20
>    Memory at fdce0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
>    Capabilities: <access denied>
>    Kernel driver in use: ath5k
>
> I've been using these cards for a couple of years now, both as managed
> clients and access points (although that was back when you had to use
> madwifi).
>
> On recent releases of Ubuntu this card is "Plug it in and go," as  
> ath5k
> is generally compiled and distributed with the kernel.  No proprietary
> firmware, no external tools, it just works.  Not sure about the most
> recent stable release of Debian, but it works perfectly on sid, and  
> who
> uses anything older than Debian "unstable" (also known as Debian
> still-stabler-than-Ubuntu-ever-is) anyway?
>
> The one corollary is that on a tower box you really want to replace  
> the
> mini aerial supplied with a cabled one to get any decent reception (or
> have your box oriented so the back of it is facing towards the access
> point).  To this end I have a DWL-M60AT patch antenna hooked up to  
> mine.
>
> Unfortunately these don't seem to be available at the easy retailers  
> any
> more.  The DWA-510 that's available from Dick Smith and Harris Tech
> right now uses an ralink rt61 chipset, for which I don't believe  
> there's
> direct kernel support (there -is- some downloadable driver, but I've
> pretty much always had atheros chips).
>
> All that aside, it's probably much easier to go the USB route.
>
> Cheers,
> Francis
>
> On Sun, 2010-06-20 at 19:13 +1000, Grant Baldwin wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I'm after a PCI card to do 802.11g (or n if possible) that will work
>> reliably under current stable releases of Debian and Ubuntu.
>>
>> In the past, this has been a serious headache and a significant  
>> point of
>> effort; not infrequently requiring interrogating PCI busses,  
>> recompiling
>> long tool chains and screwing around with windows drivers. The only  
>> good
>> experience with wireless and Linux I've had to date have been with  
>> Intel
>> Centrino chipsets.
>>
>> Is there a decent, reliable, supported family of PCI wireless cards  
>> out
>> there?
>>
>> Thanks,
>>
>> Grant Baldwin
>>
>>
>
>
> -- 
> linux mailing list
> linux at lists.samba.org
> https://lists.samba.org/mailman/listinfo/linux