[NTLUG:Discuss] Wireless

[Kevin Hulse]

--- "Ralph Green, Jr" <severian at mail.joimail.com>
wrote:
> Scott,
>   I have two pieces of bad news.  
>   The first is that the Orinoco card you got is not
> a good one.  I don't
> have enough experience with wireless too say so
> myself, but the dealer I
> bought my Orinoco Silver card from described the
> Proxim cards as junk. 
> The leader on the DFWUUG Security SIG hinted at the
> same thing.  Proxim
> bought the company, discontinued the old products
> and put the name on a
> second rate card they were already making.  That is
> what I hear,
> anyway.  I have been researching  cards for the last
> 2 months.  The
> Classic Orinoco and the Cisco Aironet seem to be the
> very best.  Prism

I've had quite good luck with the Linksys Atheros (g)
card. The Linksys USB wifi adapter is also generally
quite good. However, it's Linux support is spotty.
Under Debian test I've only succeeded in crashing the
kernel with it.

An access point might also work for you. However, AP's
certainly aren't very mobile.

Also, you need to be aware of what kind of antenna
you're getting with your device. The antenna is very
critical and hardware vendors tend to skimp quite
badly in this area. Bad antenna: no reception.

[deletia]

In general, make sure that you can build/install the
driver first before you even consider a particular
chipset. I bought one fairly generic pcmcia B card and
it turned out that the drivers depended on some bit of
precompiled binary that I could never get built on my
system.

My recommendation: Get an Atheros based card.