Wireless card

[aussierick]

Can anyone tell me what is the best wireless card to have to use in Fedora 8 and above? or where I can find a list of supported wireless cards?

[Brian1]

Nearly any wireless card either USB, PCI, or Pcmcia will work under Fedora. There are not many that work out of the box that is available today. One can get an Atheros based one and use madwifi and build it to use with the running kernel. 3985ABG if firmware and modules are built for the running kernel. Just about all will use Ndiswrapper with the windows inf driver and again compiled to run uner the current kernel. In basics any module that has to add must be built to run under the kernel. There are several post on each of this modules. Use the search tool to get an understanding of the modules mentioned here.

Now you did not mention which type of interface you wished to use USB, PCI, PCMCIA?

Now yum update tool can be used to get precompiled rpms of the module packages and the counter part portion that is built to run under the kernel you are running. So keep this in mind if you upgrade the kernel you need to upgrade the kmod portion of the module or from sorce recompile for the new kernel. Again many post describe doing the yum and source installs.

Brian

[andras]

Hi! I do not know whether it is the best wireless card, but I have Edimax EW-7128g PCI with Ralink chipset and it works under F8. (Well, sometimes the connection is lost, but that happens also under Windows so it cannot be because of the card being used under Fedora.)
Anyway, before buying any wireless card, I would consult this site:
http://linux-wless.passys.nl/ (here at least you can find out if a card is surely NOT compatible with Linux and thus should be avoided)

[MrHappy]

Hi

I spent a lot of time looking for a card that would "just work" without all the messing around that Brian1 mentioned. It took some time, but I did find a company that makes Linux/Fedora friendly wireless cards it's edimax. As an example, boot a live cd and click on Network Manager select the wireless network and you are away, other cards you have to mess around trying to get them to work.

I have the ew-7108pcg card for Notebooks.

Here's what it looks like to Fedora.

[fedora@localhost ~]$ /sbin/lspci
SNIP
02:00.0 Network controller: RaLink RT2561/RT61 802.11g PCI
[fedora@localhost ~]$

The reason I picked this card was the following statement "These products all use a Ralink chip set. Ralink have 'got the message' on Free Software, and have released their drivers under the GPL, so let's support them! For their pains Ralink won Linux Journal's Editors Choice 'Product of the Year' award in August 2005." on this web page http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/products/wireless/

A few useful sites I have picked up along the way are.

http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/

http://fedoramobile.org/

http://www.linuxwireless.org/

http://www.edimax.co.uk

Hope you find a card that works for you.

MrHappy

[flyguy97]

Here is an up-to-date website that I found that will give you all sorts of installation instructions for different wireless cards.
http://linux-wless.passys.nl/