In case you are planning to buy wireless PCI/USB

[William Park]

On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 08:49:57PM -0500, Paul Mora wrote:
> On 12/23/05, William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> >
> > On Fri, Dec 23, 2005 at 04:02:24PM -0500, Lennart Sorensen wrote:
> > > On Wed, Dec 21, 2005 at 03:44:40PM -0500, William Park wrote:
> > > > I just joined the wireless revolution, and I'm not impressed.
> > > > I bought
> > > >     - Airlink AWLH3026 PCI -- Ralink 2561 chip
> > >
> > > Well that one should work with linux from what I have read.
> >
> > That's what I thought when I bought it.  All the articles said 2500
> > chipset, but they were in fact referring to Ralink 2560 chip.  Ralink
> > 2561 is proprietary binary only.
> >
> 
> Earlier in the year, I bought an ASUS WiFi-G card from Tiger Direct for
> around $30.  At the time, I didn't know whether it worked under Linux, but
> for that price for a G card, I figured it was worth a try.  I really wanted
> this card for my PVR.
> 
> The card uses a RALINK RT2560F chipset.  I went to their website, and was
> pleasantly surprised to find some Linux drivers for it.  The first ones I
> tried were the binary only ones, and they didn't work at all.  The next ones
> I tried were the open source drivers (I had heard Ralink GPL'd their driver
> code for these cards).  I can not, for the life of me, get the drivers to
> compile.  The README file that comes with them is pretty much illegible.
> 
> Some distros include these drivers, but I could not find anything that was
> pre-built for Fedora Core 3.  I ended up getting the card working using
> ndiswrapper, but it was hit and miss, and depended on a particular kernel
> option (16K stack) which is not default in the Fedora kernels.
> 
> I gave up eventually, and just used a wired card (and snake the wire up the
> stairs, much to the chagrin of my wife).  I've still got the card, and will
> give it another go when I have time.  It works perfectly fine under that
> _other_ OS... :-(


If 'lspci' says 1814:0301, then you are in luck.  Open source driver
continues on from the manufacturer's source code, so it's more recent
and works better.  URLs are
    - http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm
    - http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Open source driver requires 2.6.13+ kernel, and supports
    - 0x0101 (RT2400 chipset for 802.11b) and
    - 0x0201 (RT2500 chipset for 802.11g)

But, not 0x0301 which is what I got.  For those of you with Ralink 2561,
here is the source package that I managed to get from the web:
    - http://home.eol.ca/~parkw/samples/rt2561STA_247_src.tar.bz2
Ralink won't release the code until Jan 2006 (well, that's what they
said to me).


After playing with wireless a bit... where's the beef?

There are WEP and WPA, but I know 2 people (in LUGs) who can crack them
in 15min.  Then, I find that Ad-Hoc specification limits to 11Mbit.
Then, I discover everything is half-duplex.  I swear, my old 10base2 was
faster than my current wireless 802.11g setup.

-- 
William Park <opengeometry-FFYn/CNdgSA at public.gmane.org>, Toronto, Canada
ThinFlash: Linux thin-client on USB key (flash) drive
	   http://home.eol.ca/~parkw/thinflash.html
BashDiff: Super Bash shell
	  http://freshmeat.net/projects/bashdiff/
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