Wireless for Linux?

August 1, 2005 7:33 AM

Wireless for Linux?

I'm trying to set up a wireless network in my home, and have been looking for a wireless card I can use in my computer that will work with Linux. I'd prefer that it is a usb adapter, since a don't have any room inside my computer to go installing a card. I'm aware of ndiswrapper, but I am using a Mac, and I'd like to be sure that whatever I end up buying will work without an x86 type processor. (and lets can the talk of why you think I should be using OS X, the reasons I use Linux are my own) Anyone have any experiences and/or advice they can give?

posted by northernsoul to computers & internet (6 comments total)

This list of USB network devices might help.
posted by cmonkey at 8:06 AM on August 1, 2005

northernsoul, meet Jean Tourrilhes.

Nutshell summary: you'll probably find that any 802.11b card will work easily in a modern Linux system. Most 802.11a/g cards will work as well, but perhaps not easily: there may not be a full functionality, no major bugs, open source driver available and you may have to "settle" for ndiswrapper.

Basically, look at a commercial product you're considering buying, use Google to determine the chipset inside it, and refer to the link above to see how well it is supported. You'll quickly find that there are only a few chipsets for any given class of product - for example, for 802.11b USB adapters, there's Atmel and Prism2 and, uh, I'm not sure what else.
posted by jellicle at 8:09 AM on August 1, 2005

What flavor of Linux are you using? Many Linux distro websites feature known hardware compatibility/incompatibility (e.g. Ubuntu.)
posted by Zed_Lopez at 8:50 AM on August 1, 2005

I have had good success with ralink-based devices -- gpl drivers for linux (and open source drivers for bsd) exist, as well as drivers for windows and osx.

personally I like this particularasus usb device. has served me well in the last few months.

nb: due to endian-ness issues, the open source ralink drivers are not quite working on ppc linux just yet.

I like the ralink hardware 'cos it works pretty much everywhere, and does not even require a proprietary/binary firmware blob like some of the other quasi-opensource driver hardwares (e.g. atheros/madwifi, I believe...)
posted by dorian at 9:32 AM on August 1, 2005

Thanks for the help. I'll be using Ubuntu, btw.
posted by northernsoul at 11:51 AM on August 1, 2005

almost forgot (which was rather stupid of me) -- apparently the bsd versions of the ralink drivers *do* work well enough on ppc and there also happens to be a linux port of the bsd driver (but only for the usb devices I believe) which does work on ppc linux. (the bsd guys made their own driver from scratch and thus did not inherit the endian-ness issues of the code ralink provided to the linux guys)

also, ubuntu does not ship the kernel headers/sources necessary to build these driver modules, so would require an existing network connection to install the requisite packages. to get around this I have been using kanotix which does have the necessary bits on its livecd. however: (a) I much prefer kubuntu, and (2) kanotix does not have a ppc variant like ubuntu does.

I've yet to find a ppc livecd that ships the kernel sources but would love to find one since I have a mac pismo that could really use such a thing.
posted by dorian at 9:08 PM on August 1, 2005