On Sun, 2007-06-17 at 00:02 +0300, Geoff Shang wrote: > Hi, > > I've got an Edimax wireless router (not sure of the model number as I can't > read it),and now need some PC hardware to go with it. > > 1. I need a PCMCIA wireless adaptor or something else suitable for a > laptop. > > 2. I need something suitable for a desktop PC.
Edimax wireless cards (PCI and cardbus) are very common, and they all tout Linux support - unfortunately its not that simple: these cards are based on RaLink chipsets for which RaLink released GPL drivers, but the RaLink drivers will not work with modern kernels (they claim support for Fedora, for example, but don't tell you what version - I suspect it was Fedora Core 1 or something). The rt2x00 project aims to write new drivers based on the original GPL release from RaLink but they are not there yet, and will not have good drivers for non-developers until the new wireless stack is integrated into the main kernel tree - which is yet a while to come. The rt2x00 project also releases updated versions of the original RaLink GPL drivers, called legacy drivers by rt2x00 - these sometimes work, and are even bundled with some recent Linux distributions - for example SuSE 10.2, but getting encrypted wireless to work with them can be very hard. I managed to get WEP to work with Edimax cards (I have both a PCI version and a cardbus version) but no WPA (1 or 2). Like mentioned in the list before, I also have good experience with atheros madwifi cards, but unfortunately I couldn't find any place that sells them in Israel. I currently recommend Linksys cards based on broadcom chipsets. They are still harder to get then the RaLink based ones, but knowing what brand to look for would help you avoid cheap RaLink based hardware that pervades the market these days (they seem to be on almost every wireless product I looked at in the last year). Once you get a broadcom based card, there is a non-trivial setup process that has to be done, to extract the firmware from the official NDIS drivers, but there is ample documentation and helper scripts to let you achieve that - and after that is done once, your card will work perfectly under Linux. -- Oded ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
