[svlug] Can someone recommend a Linux supporting PCI wireless card?

[Christian Einfeldt]

hi

On 10/10/07, Roland Krause <rokrau at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I need to buy a PCI wireless card. Any recommendations? I prefer to buy
> from a Vendor that supports Linux and if that's not available I'd go for
> soemthing easy as in: "Walk into Fry's/MicroCenter, pick up the card, pay,
> install, modprobe  blah... system-config-network blah blah blah....
>
> It's a brand new box, so  I am going to run whatever the latest Fedora
> Core is that is out when the thing finally arrives.


I do know that Knoppix 5.1 has excellent wireless card support.  Jason
Turner of the SF-LUG list recently helped me get a wireless card working at
our last SF-LUG meeting at Javacat.  So even if it is not the distro that
you would use for all purposes, it might help you at least test your card.
Here is a cut and paste from a recent email to the SF-LUG list in which I
described how Jason Turner and Jim Stockford helped me get it running.  This
is obviously not a GUI-based solution, which would be optimal, but it sure
is nice to know that you can use the CLI to test it in a pinch, and it is
really great for diagnosing:

This is really the hard way to do it, but in a pinch, it will work.  And I
recommend that you travel with the latest live version of Knoppix at all
times, because it is so awesome at finding hardware, as it did in this
example below.  One caveat:  I did the typing below, but I was aided by two
really awesome GNU Linux gurus from our local SF-LUG (Jason Turner and Jim
Stockford).  I am betting that you can get wireless working on pretty much
any GNU Linux box by booting into your Knoppix 5.x live CD doing

$ sudo iwlist ath0 scanning

which will produce a list of working access points.  You then need to
"associate" your system with the appropriate access point by doing

$ sudo iwconfig ath0 essid "Java Cat Wi Fi"

in which Java Cat Wi Fi is the name of a wifi spot in San Francisco where we
had an SF-LUG meeting just this very morning.  You then need to
"authenticate" yourself to the wlan if it requires the same by doing

$ sudo iwconfig ath0 essid "Java Cat Wi Fi" key s:[password here]

Final step: use ifup to force your ath0 to activate the connection

$ sudo ifup ath0

And eureka !  you will be live!  Below is the output of my most recent shell
session:
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