phunni Posted December 11, 2006 Report Share Posted December 11, 2006 OK - I am sick and tired of ndiswrapper breaking whenever the wind direction changes! Recommendations for wireless cards with native drivers that are consistently rock solid please! Ideally cheap - but I'm desperate! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted December 11, 2006 Report Share Posted December 11, 2006 If you're card is atheros chipset based, maybe try if madwifi will work under Arch. Doesn't use ndiswrapper at least, and might save you having to buy another card. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jaraeez Posted December 11, 2006 Report Share Posted December 11, 2006 OK - I am sick and tired of ndiswrapper breaking whenever the wind direction changes! Recommendations for wireless cards with native drivers that are consistently rock solid please! Ideally cheap - but I'm desperate! lol I hear you & totally agree. NDISwrapper has been fine & I am grateful of the App but as you state I am also tired of it breaking 'nilly willy'. So I to am after a wireless PCI card which just works with Linux, which has the drivers already built in so once I boot any distro just using wlan I'm CONNECTED..!! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emmanuel_uk Posted December 11, 2006 Report Share Posted December 11, 2006 Do you want it new or 2d hand? It is a chicken and egg story. If you look in the kernel it gives you an idea of what chipset are good, then go to vendors and one by one look at card description and usually there is no full chipset description. If you start from description and google to see if it is linux supported it is not always easy to find anything If you ask somebody the card they know about is not available here I mean in other countries or is now discontinued We really need vendor to say "linux kernel enabled" or something of the like. Hope somebody has a good suggestion, anyway 2d hand or not, that maks a difference in what people can suggest. Hardware compatibility database? good but is the item still on sale... not always Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted December 11, 2006 Author Report Share Posted December 11, 2006 If you're card is atheros chipset based, maybe try if madwifi will work under Arch. Doesn't use ndiswrapper at least, and might save you having to buy another card. I tried madwifi first off - but it wouldn't work at all... I guess I could give it another go, but this wasn't that long ago so I'm not all that confident... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ianw1974 Posted December 11, 2006 Report Share Posted December 11, 2006 Yeah, I didn't have much luck with madwifi in Mandriva, but was suggesting might be worth a shot if it saves buying a new card. I never tried long enough to be honest to persevere and see if I could get it working. ndiswrapper was just so quick to get installed and up and running, that madwifi lost out :P Sometimes though, new hardware is the only way forward. Although, all my cards are Atheros based, and I've never had it break in Mandy. It only broke when I was using arch and something got upgraded. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
arthur Posted December 16, 2006 Report Share Posted December 16, 2006 RaLink released their wireless chipset drivers as open-source, and I use both a pcmcia (Edimax 7108PCG) on my laptop and pci card (sitecom wl-115) for my desktop. Works excellent under gentoo and ubuntu, haven't tested on mandriva. (both my cards use rt2500 chipset) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted December 16, 2006 Report Share Posted December 16, 2006 (edited) rt2500 chipset based ones work pretty well. my method for finding wireless cards, is to go to a vendor's page. pick a couple of cards, and then just google them until im sure what chipset that they have, and then pick the one with the better chipset. surprised you havnt had luck with the atheros, madwifi is a half excellent driver and is finally at a stable release. (excellent because it works, but only half because of a crap design stopping it being merged) James Edited December 16, 2006 by iphitus Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted December 16, 2006 Author Report Share Posted December 16, 2006 Perhaps I'll take another look at madwifi - although I've managed to get a stable system but getting pacman to not auto update kernel, ndiswrapper and fglrx... I figure if I do these manually when I'm confident they'll work then I'll be OK. I think my recent ndiswrapper problems were due to the kernel being updated but the driver not... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
iphitus Posted December 16, 2006 Report Share Posted December 16, 2006 Perhaps I'll take another look at madwifi - although I've managed to get a stable system but getting pacman to not auto update kernel, ndiswrapper and fglrx... I figure if I do these manually when I'm confident they'll work then I'll be OK. I think my recent ndiswrapper problems were due to the kernel being updated but the driver not... still on arch? pacman -S madwifi? Though you'll need to Syu to 2.6.19. I find that on my computers, holding back the Syu causes more problems than just Syu'ing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
phunni Posted December 16, 2006 Author Report Share Posted December 16, 2006 Wouldn't be on anything else! Unfortunately, If I just pacman -Syu at the moment, then I lose wireless - which means I can't get anything! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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