Speaking of wireless

Rich Payne rdp at talisman.mv.com
Wed Aug 28 09:05:19 EDT 2002


On 27 Aug 2002, Paul Iadonisi wrote:

> 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.

I can second this. Like most things I've found with Cisco, it's expensive, 
but it works. Cisco also provide a driver and a port of their ACU utility 
for Linux. It allows you to setup various profiles (Home, work etc..) and 
check Link quality, strength etc...

>   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.

I also have a 3Com card (based on the Spectrum24_T chipset) and this is 
now fairly easy to use in Linux. Though in the beginning it was a 
nightmare.

--rdp

-- 
Rich Payne
http://talisman.mv.com




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