It is really unclear to me what is and is not supported by free software
here. There appears to be some chipsets supported without non-free firmware.
However there may be some modes of operation that are not supported without
the non-free firmware.
The only chipsets I'm sure are free software compatible right now with
Trisquel 5.5 are: ar9170 and rtl8187/rtl8187b/rtl8187l.
It looks to me like there may be an upcoming driver which does not depend on
any non-free firmware as well for some realtek cards. I actually just sent an
email to see if we canget some clarifcation. I'll investigate further if the
news seems positive...
We actually need a new G USB chipset... which this may or may not solve
depending on if these chipsets are discontinued or not.
If you need to get a replacement card we have some stock left of USB wifi
cards with those supported chipsets. We have about a months worth of stock
verified for the USB G RTL8187B chipset and I also have found some new old
stock. Although I'm still looking into aquiring it and I don't know how much
exists.
The ar9170 I'm still working on verifying. Supposedly we can get a small
quantity to hold us over for another year until support for a newer chipset
becomes available.
