[NTLUG:Discuss] wireless 802.11b NIC's for Linux

[Ralph Green, Jr]

Howdy,
  I knew from our Chris Cox's comments that I wanted a Prism 2 chipset
when I started playing with Wireless.  I got a pcmcia card by trolling
on ebay and searching for auctions that mentioned Prism.  That yielded a
good card for $20.  It is a Compaq brand card.  Unfortunately, my Linux
laptop seems to have dead PCMCIA slots.  So, I got a Siemens USB
wireless nic with a Prism 2.5.  There is a guy at First Saturday who
seems to be reselling warranty returns for Siemens or something like
that.  He guarantees everything and he has been coming for at least 6
months.  He knew what chipsets were in his products and which worked
with Linux.
 I used the Siemens 802.11b nic this last weekend and it works great. 
The only limitation was that I could not get a connection when WPA was
enabled on the access point.  I had to drop the access point back to
wep.  My laptop runs SuSE 9 and I believe this is a driver issue.  WPA
was quite recent when SuSE 9 was being assembled and newer wlan-usb
drivers will likely solve this.  I did not have to install any new
software.  I just had to configure the nic in Yast.
Good luck,
Ralph
 

On Tue, 2004-03-09 at 13:54, Steve Martindell wrote:
> I have been reading the thread on wireless NICs here on NTLUG.
> It appears that cards with Prism2 chipset have a good chance
> of working with Linux.

...
> So where/how can I purchase a wireless NIC that has the Prism2 chipset?