Speaking of wireless

[Paul Iadonisi]

On Tue, 2002-08-27 at 19:38, Ken Ambrose wrote:
> IMHO, stay the hell away from Prism chipsets (eg. the Linksys cards).
> You have to play all sorts of games with re-compiling:
> - your kernel
> - PCMCIA stuff from Sourceforge
> - linux-wlan drivers
> 
> None of this may necessary if you have a stock kernel -- they try to have
> stock binaries at the linux-wlan site.  Andy maybe someone's had an easier
> time of it than me.  But I've tried, twice, to get the darn drivers
> working.  The first time, after ages, I got it going, under RH 7.1.  I
> also finally got it working under 7.3... but now none of my /other/
> PCMCIA/Cardbus network cards work.  It's really, really, really annoying.

  I think I'd have to agree, here.  That's why I took Tom Buskey's
earlier advice and returned the Linksys WPC11v22 today.  I'm looking at
the possibility of getting a Cisco 350.  I tried one today and was
astonished that it required *zero* tweaking of my Red Hat 7.3
distribution.  I plugged it in, and had an address in seconds (on eth0
instead of that funky wlan0).  It is quite a bit more expensive (~$140
vs. ~$90), but when I see something work out of the box like that, I
don't mind paying more for it.
  My experience, of course, was exacerbated by the Linksys
WPC11v3/WAPv2.2 incompatibility.  I *did* manage to get the WPC11v3
working without rebuilding my kernel, but I had to jump through a number
of hoops.  The available rpms available for the linux-wlan drivers run a
bit behind, as well (v0.14 of linux-wlan for 2.4.18-5 of the kernel
where 0.15-pre4 is out and so is the 2.4.18-10 kernel errata), so I had
to try building my own.  I was about to dive into that until I had such
an easy time with the Cisco and decided to can the Linksys.

-- 
-Paul Iadonisi
 Senior System Administrator
 Red Hat Certified Engineer / Local Linux Lobbyist
 Ever see a penguin fly?  --  Try Linux.
 GPL all the way: Sell services, don't lease secrets