Best/easiest PCMCIA wireless adapter?

[caitlyn]

Avoid the DLink cards.  Some of the latest do NOT have an Atheros or Prism chipset.  The firmware is expected to reside on the PC, not the card.  Think Winmodem here.  It is possible to get these to run with NDISwrapper and the firmware and there are some websites that detail that (the Damn Small Linux forum has details somewhere) but it is a royal pain in the a--. 

Atheros chipset (using the Madwifi drivers) work very well indeed.  My Airlink 101 AWLC4030 worked out of the box with VL, both 5.1 and 5.8.

[bobbear43]

Working on getting a Belkin card with Atheros chip set to work. May just give up and look for another solution.........

WHAT *READILY AVAILABLE* WIRELESS PCMCIA NICS WILL WORK "OUT OF THE BOX?" - Which assumes running VASM not expecting magic, but expecting VASM to configure, and then wireless simply works with no further intervention.  <-- If we don't get to that level of functionality, all Linuxes are out of reach for the ordinary user.

System:
ThinkPad 600E Pentium II 400 Mhz 288 MB
32-bit CardBus PCMCIA
VL 5.8 Standard and "Vanilla" (i.e. "out of the box" with no user modifications)

[newt]

I use a Linksys WPC54GS (v1, I think) and, on an unprotected network, it works out-of-the-box - just click 'Connect' in wifi-radar.  However, since I use WPA it takes a bit more configuration (wpa_supplicant) but does not require me to load/compile alternate or special modules and I don't use ndiswrapper.  I simply use the bcm43xx module that's automatically loaded by VL and it works really slick.

HTH!

[bobbear43]

"D-Link AirPlus DWL-G650 worked out of the box for me. Not a problem to speak of."

I obtained this card, but it seems to have an Atheros chipset. lspci shows:
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. AR5212 802.11abg NIC (rev 01)

How does it work "out of the box?" VASM detected it but set it as eth0 instead of ath0. Fixed that.

Tried wifi-radar. Card communicates with router but doesn't get IP address. No encryption on the network.

[AndK]

Today I installed Vector Light 5.9 on my newly aquired second hand Thinkpad T23. After some struggling I managed to get my D-Link DWL-G650 rev. C2 (Atheros) cardbus Wifi adapter to work. The card had been used on my Toshiba Tecra 8000 prior to that. It worked with VL 5.1 and 5.8 (and windows 98) but it didn't run right out of the box. The 5.8 was pretty easy to get it to cooperate, the main sumbling point was the driver change by madwifi people from 'madwifi' to 'wext'. Once I learned that I was able get connected quickly.

Now though, after a repeated VL 5.9 Light installation (with PC card out) and relatively short fiddling with VASM I am able to connect to my WPA access point but every once in a while the PC freezes, the adapter loses wifi connection despite the close proximity to the AP (~1m). Removing  the card instantly 'unfreezes' the system.

I am going to try my luck with 5.9 regular and maybe SOHO and hopefully I will be report back on my 'out of the box' success.

Cheers

[newt]

~5 years ago my wife and I bought a new amd HP laptops, and at the same time bought a complete wireless setup (d-link airplus xtreme router with matching pcmcia cards; likely they were g650's).  Began using the wireless hardware and we started experiencing freezing; both computers were having the same problem - random freezing within a few minutes of using the wireless connection, however you could remove the pcmcia card and the system would come back to life (although it required a reboot to get the card working again and then the same circular situation would happen).  I tried everything I could to resolve the issue using the knowledge I had at the time and available windows tools/drivers.  As it turns out, nothing worked.  I remember searching for people having similar problems and determined that this was a common occurance on _some_ hardware.  Of everything I read, no one had developed a solution.  Luckily this was all within a few days of purchasing the hardware so we returned everything and bought a linksys setup; everything since then has been great.  The stock linksys firmware is a bit lacking but some third-party firmwares add plenty of features without much fuss.

My inclination is to think that you're running into this random hardware incompatibility with the d-link wireless card.  I hope that you are not because I don't believe there exists a solution to the problem, however be aware that this is a possibility.

Good luck!

[AndK]

Thank you,

I am giving my Tecra to my wife. It will hopefully work with the g650 as it has been for those years. Sorted (sort of ;-))!

The task of chosing the right card for the T23 remains, though. I'll use the pointers given here and try my luck with some other Atheros based card.

Edit 27-10-08: I have unpacked a TP-Link brand PC card (lspci gives: Atheros AR5005G) and installed it. So far I experienced one several minutes log system freeze :-(. Perhaps I will give it another try in a fresh VL install.

Cheers
Andrzej

[roxburd]

I used the a EDUP/Atheros PCMCIA card with WPA/PSK. No problems.