Lan Barnes wrote:
On Sun, Nov 13, 2005 at 01:30:46PM -0800, Todd Walton wrote:

On 11/13/05, Lan Barnes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

Completely agreed. I have extensive experience. Airlink is a pest.

I've never had a problem with Airlink ethernet cards or routers.

-todd



Please *please* share your experience. <Lan to Todd -- I need you, man!>

1. What does lspci list their chip sets as?

2. What drivers do you use?

3. Are you using special sacrifices, incantations, or incense?

My laptop uses an Intel wireless card, which is very well supported. But even it has problems. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of grief with WiFi on Linux.

Variables which affect whether or not your card will work, and how well, are

o Motherboard Chipsets
o Kernel version
o Distribution
o Driver module (software)
o Firmware (if any on card)
o ACPI
o Various other libraries and
o Network drivers
o System scripts

To keep my card working with each new kernel and networking-related library/driver update, I monitor several developer mailing lists:

ACPI4Asus
ACPI4Linux
HostAP
IPW2200

From following (and posting to) these lists, I have learned that today your WiFi card works. Tonight you run yum update, and tomorrow your WiFi card doesn't work (right). As Linux patches and updates come pretty frequently now (especially for Fedora - and I don't mean just major releases), there is always a likelihood your your card will stop working at some point. To keep my laptop stable, I am still using an older version of kernel 2.6.12 until I have the time to fiddle with any new problems.

How bad is it really? Most of the WiFi-related networking stuff in still pre-1.0, and the rest is barely 1.0.

I recommend that you find someone who is running the same hardware, Distro, and kernel as you, and then pick the same card they are using.

I found enough useful info through Googling to get my card working, including a patch sent to me from someone with the same basic configuration (although different distro).

Another thing you can try is running your card under Ndiswrapper which
basically is the Windows driver wrapped in Linux tendrils.

Another problem is that some drivers may fight with each other: dhclient, NetworkManager, Wireless Extensions (Wireless Tools), WPA_supplicant, various scripts, etc.

I have had good luck so far using NetworkManager under KDE. But I still often have to stop-start the network service, NetworkManager, NetworkManagerInfo, and dhclient manually after boot.

(Did you know that the Network GUI utility in Gnome/KDE supports profiles? I found that helpful in keeping Ethernet and WiFi settings away from each other.)

Feel better now?
I didn't think so (but it's ten times worse on a laptop, so feel lucky).

--
   Best Regards,
      ~DJA.


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