Suggest a PCMCIA wireless card?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: William Muriithi <william.muriithi-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w at public.gmane.org>

| I personally prefer the atheros chipset as they are perfectly
| supported - they are the only two vendors that provide Linux hacker,
| the other being Intel. Another good thing about them is they allow the
| card to be an AP, if you feel like converting your laptop to a
| wireless router.

What a crapshoot.

A year ago, on my son's new Acer notebook, I had trouble getting the
madwifi driver going for the built-in wireless.  It used the
(non-open) HAL.  The HAL was giving a cryptic error code to the driver
and it was passing the hot potato to me.

Then I switched to NDIS wrapper.  It didn't work either.  I talked to
the author on IRC and he logged onto the notebook and fixed it!  The
problem was that the notebook is multicore and the driver had never
been tested on an MP system.  The fix went into the project CVS.  Talk
about service!

NDIS wrapper is not a great solution but it was the only solution.

Recent releases of Ubuntu support the card with no tweaking.  I don't
even know if it is using HAL or OpenHAL.

I have a notebook with a ralink wireless interface.  It worked out of
the box a couple of years ago.  But certain functionality was missing
that kismet wanted to use.

(Some?) Broadcom wireless interfaces now work due to reverse
engineering.  But only in STA mode (i.e. as clients).  Unfortunately,
Broadcom interfaces are very common in wireless routers where modes
other than STA are needed.  Grrr.

As others have said, Intel seems to be a good choice, but they don't
seem to make add-on cards.  MiniPCI cards maybe.

Stupid laptop manufacturers often have "whitelists" of approved
minipci cards in their BIOSes.  So replacing the miniPCI card with one
that has Linux support may not work.  This is true of at least some HP
notebooks (i.e. the one I own) and I think it is true of some
ThinkPads.
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