Wireless NIC

[mystified]

Can anyone recommend a good wireless NIC for Mandriva? I usually buy Netgear products.

[tyme]

i imagine checking mandriva's hardware database would be a good first step.

[ianw1974]

Mine is an atheros chipset based wireless card and works OK, but the only option is ndiswrapper, since no module is available for it, and madwifi is beta and never worked for me. However, ndiswrapper does work a treat with it.

 

If you want native, I think most people have used netgear products, but might be worthwhile checking the linux compatibility and what kernel version is required as tyme mentioned. Mandriva's database isn't completely correct and is missing a lot of information from what I know.

 

Stay away from the Intel wireless, there's no end of people who have problems with them.

[mystified]

So much for Mandriva's HCL. I bought a card listed and it's not supported!

[coverup]

So much for Mandriva's HCL. I bought a card listed and it's not supported!

Since you are prepared to spend some money, and you already have a card, you could try Linuxant driverloader http://www.linuxant.com before making a purchase. Many people have trouble with ndiswrapper including myself, but driverloader worked for me from the first time on. There is an evaluation period of 30 days which gives you plenty of time to check if it works.

Edited May 7, 2006 by coverup

[tyme]

So much for Mandriva's HCL. I bought a card listed and it's not supported!

are you sure? i remember that it was working, but then it stopped...it may not be the driver that's the problem.

[iphitus]

Search the forums?

 

The fact that you bought a supported one, which we have already worked out works, and isnt working, you're just wasting money buying new hardware to work around crappiness in mandrake.

 

But if you must drain the money,

 

anything intel based, although I dont think they release seperate intel cards - only integrated stuff. All the same, recently their newer ipw3945 hit 1.0, which is good news, and ipw2100/2200 have long been running awesomely.

 

atheros seems alright, the driver madwifi/madwifi-ng seems to work for most people. Not a fan of the driver for atheros cards though as it's current design makes it unsuitable for merging it to vanilla and it's chances of that happing are zilch.

 

ralink's various rt2x00 chipsets have good drivers if your system is not SMP (multicore/hyperthreading/multiple cpu).

If your system is, rt2500 has SMP support in CVS, and there's rt2x00 which is far more developmental but is progressing at an impressive rate. They work for some, but it's definitely no guarantee, and they are still very slow.

 

previously people would have said to avoid broadcom based devices, however, there's a driver that's been merged into 2.6.17, which is still in -rc, although I am not sure on it's stability. It should be at least usable if it's in 2.6.17. But then again, mandrake has nothing up to date like 2.6.17... which forces you to use ndiswrapper on mandrake.

 

try to avoid anything TI-ACX based, there's drivers, but I've yet to hear much success with them, it seems they're pretty developmental and slow in development as there arent too many cards out there using TI's wireless chipsets.

 

avoid anything Realtek RTL8180 based, I have sighted a driver for this, however it seemed very early in development.

 

anything prism54 should work awesomely, the drivers have been around for ages, are in vanilla, and work very well. However these devices are harder to come by, as they're being replaced by the cheaper to manufacture software based devices such as ralink's rt2x00, and broadcom's bcm43xx. Somewhat like back in the days of winmodems... but at least we have drivers for these now.

 

Anyway, that's an overview of the most common wireless chipsets out there. I hesitate to give you an exact model of wireless card, as it's very common for vendors to release multiple revisions with different chipsets, with no change in packaging. Your best to find a couple, do some research on the vendors homepage to what driver they use, or if you are fortunate, the packaging or advertising.

 

/end state of wireless affairs under linux (or at least, most 802.11g and one or two 802.11b and some that do abg or bg) :)

 

I'm impressed with the rapid improvement of Linux wireless device support. It's gotta helluva long way to go, and a lot of consolidation to do - currently there are three wireless stacks, devicescape 80211, intel's ieee80211 and softmac - each with their own advantages and disadvantages. But at least it goes to show that hardware support is no longer the primary problem, It's distros, providing the drivers, and easy, RELIABLE, SIMPLE, userspace configuration.

 

It's sad to see people with devices that have native drivers, dealing with ndiswrapper, linuxant, and other alternatives, or who have supported devices but have troubles configuring them.

 

As an example, just scrolling down the ndiswrapper list, which you could almost call definitive now, I see only the most obscure of devices which use chipsets we do not have drivers for/i have not seen drivers for.

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php/List

 

James

 

suggestion to mods, maybe sticky this?

Edited May 8, 2006 by iphitus

[ianw1974]

I'd definitely make sure that your current card is faulty before purchasing another one. I remember in your other post you rebooted and it started working again. Could just be some sort of configuration problem that's missing a bit here or there for constant connectivity without the need for reboot.

[iphitus]

If it's working sporadically, theres a higher chance there's a software/userspace/mandriva issue than hardware issue.

[mystified]

See networking but I tried installing ubuntu with my old card and it couldn't detect a signal and suggested hardware failure. But the new card didn't work either so I'm returning the new one and putting the old one back in. It worked fine before I decided to go WEP.