Well I seem to have made some progress on getting a wireless card which works well with gNewSense. I've bought a Linksys WUSB54G version 4, which I managed to find on eBay. According to the list at http://ralink.rapla.net/, as well as the list on the FSF taken from there, it uses the RT2500 chipset, so it should work well. It's also one of the two which have specificially been tested by the FSF and found to work well.
So far, I've managed to get it working well with an unsecured network, out of the box with gNewSense and Kubuntu Edgy. Strangely, it seems to use the RT2570 driver, as that's the module that's loaded, even though it definitely identifies itself as 'RT2500USB WLAN' when you run iwconfig in the command line, so I assume it must be using the right chipset. I don't know if the RT2570 is another chipset, or if that's a different driver specifically for the USB cards which use the RT2500 chipset. However, I need to get WPA working, which I haven't managed to do yet. WPA seems to be quite difficult with GNU/Linux at the moment, and it isn't supported by the standard configuration in GNOME or KDE. That's not too surprising as it's a relatively very new technology, as wireless networking generally is, and it doesn't even work hugely well on Windows yet, despite the much larger support it has from manufacturers and software developers. I've got it working before with the not-very-good, proprietary-firmware-needing driver for my ZD1211B-based card using KNetWorkManager, but that doesn't seem to be working for the new card at the moment. I've found a HOWTO for RT2500 chipsets on the Ubuntu forums which I'm trying to follow, but that hasn't worked yet either. One thing that's particularly strange is that the device for the new card is called 'rausb0' on my computer, rather than 'ra0', which seems to be more common in the HOWTOs. Anyway, hopefully I'll manage to get that working soon. If I do, I can confirm whether or not I think this card is a good choice for gNewSense users. On a different note, this list seems to be quite quiet at the moment. I assume that's because of the new forum. I think I prefer mailing lists, except for points which are completely off topic, because it's easier to keep track of discussions. Guy _______________________________________________ gNewSense-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/gnewsense-users
