Linux and Wireless

rout3r

rout3r

rout3r

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Joined
19 Oct 2002
Posts
467
How easy is it to setup a wireless connection on a linux box, using a USB wireless dongle?

Are drivers easily available, or will the dongle be detected and setup automatically?

Cheers
 
Support is poor compared to Windows XP naturally. The chances are that your USB dongle wont be compatible.

The first thing to do is to check what chipset your dongle uses, is it an Atheros (good support in Linux), is it a broadcom (poor support), etc ..

You can use Ndiswrapper to install the windows drivers for the device to get it to work, although this is sometimes hit and miss.

A lot of newer distro's like Mepis and SuSE are quite good at picking up and installing a wireless adapter as all (a good few) of the drivers (native) and ndiswrapper with windows drivers are included.
 
Thanks for that.

I haven't actually bought the dongle yet - I just thought it would be the easiest, but if it will be a hassle with drivers, perhaps a PCI card would be better?
 
I think as a general rule of thumb a PCI card would be best.

I can definately recommend the Netgear WG311T, I'm using one which has an Atheros chipset.

Have a good search to see if you can find recommended one's. The thing is that sometimes the manufacturer changes chipset and makes a new revision, so a version 2 card might be Atheros based, but a version 4 might be something else.

Either way, failing native support, Ndiswrapper is quite good..
 
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Any tips on installing it?!! ;)

I've bought a WG311T, and I'm trying to install it on my FC4 box. I've got the madwifi drivers, but I keep getting errors.

I tried the tarball, and I get a uudecode missing error - and I can't find where to download it from. So I downloaded the RPM, and I'm getting a failed dependancy: "madwifi-kmdl-0.9.6.0-18.rhfc4.at".

I'm out of ideas - any help would be appreciated!
 
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