[NTLUG:Discuss] RE: Wireless Home Network

[Courtney Grimland]

Hanna, Mark wrote:

>Some wireless NIC's drivers are considerable easier the others to compile and use under Linux.  I've used only PCMCIA cards for my laptops at home, but I suspect desktop/server cards are about the same.  The driver all comes down to the chipset used in the NIC... typically either Orinoco, prism or tulip.  Some PCMCIA NICs also require a "firmware" file that should come on the install CD... even though it is a Windows file, Linux still needs it in some cases.
>

I bought a D-Link DWL-650 PCMCIA card at Fry's because it was dirt 
cheap.  It's based on the ACX-100 chipset (Texas Instruments, I 
believe).  It's apparently not supported well, but there is this 
sourceforge site:

http://acx100.sourceforge.net/

It does require the firmware file, which can be automatically wget'ed 
during the 'configure' or 'make' process (I forget which).  I didn't 
spend a lot of time on it, but I wasn't able to get the driver to 
compile.  I've also read that it works reasonably well with the 
linux-wlan-ng drivers, but I havent' tried that yet.