USB Wifi is a major issue right now. There are only a handful of cards you
can still get with the right chipsets. Those chipsets are 8187B, 8187L, and
AR9170. Two are 802.11G chipsets and the third is an 802.11N chipset.
The number of cards with these chipsets still available I can probably count
on one hand.
Laptop wifi cards are not a major issue for the time being as all Atheros
802.11N Mini PCIe cards are supported. To clarify this I'm not saying that
the most recent edition is supported out of the box. It should work out of
the box going forward though.
The one thing you should be careful of with Atheros Mini PCIe cards is the
bluetooth/wifi combo cards. The Bluetooth chipset on these cards is not free
software compatible. The source code for the firmware is not available under
a free software license like the wifi card is.
We sell a USB bluetooth card that works with free software though so if you
need support for this you can get it. I should also mention that we came
across some USB bluetooth adapters that appeared as though they should have
worked with free software and did not. CSR puts out the chipset you want
although not all Bluetooth USB cards with this or at least some of their
bluetooth chipsets are compatible. It may just be a matter of time until
these are supported. I'm not 100% sure.
