[Centos] centos wireless 54Mb card

[Troy Engel]

Not specifically related to CentOS, but .11g in general; basically it's 
not as nice as it was in the .11b era. Due to whatever random factors 
(I've heard FCC involvement regarding the ability to tweak the wattage), 
it's increasingly harder to find a complete open source supported .11g 
chipset.

For instance, Proxim/Orinoco - long known as one of the best .11b cards 
- moved to using an Atheros chipset inside, who in turn refuses to 
release the specs (sorta - NDA stuff), which in turn leads to a binary 
"chunk" (the HAL) as part of the driver. This is causing the driver 
world a long time to get good, stable drivers for .11g (see 
madwifi.sf.net regarding this Atheros thing).

Recently a comrade turned me on to "RALink" chipset cards 
(http://www.ralinktech.com.tw/), who are very open source friendly - not 
only do they release fully GPL drivers, but they also help the open 
source project (rt2400.sf.net) and link directly to that from their 
driver page. As such, I bought a $35 Asus WL-107 pcmcia card 
(mobileplanet.com) using the ralink chipset, and am trying to help the 
project with my Fedora Core 3 laptop. See the project page for more.

So, in summary you need to research the actual chipsets used in the 
target cards, then go looking at the driver situation (whether it be 
Atheros, Prism2, RALink, etc) -- in 2 years I'm sure they'll be stable, 
but for right now the .11g world is a bit of a guessing game.

hope this helps,
-te

B.vanBurk at fi.uu.nl wrote:
> Hi,
> A collegue of mine wants to go wireless at his home.
> 
> Anyone got any buyer tips for a low-maintenance 54Mb brand/model and Centos?
> 
> Kind regards
> Barrie
> 
> 
> 
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-- 
Troy Engel | Systems Engineer
Fluid, Inc | http://www.fluid.com