[ILUG] Wireless Broadband Connections

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Mark Page (markpage at eircom.net):

> Having been fortunate enough to get a cheap laptop, invested in a 
> USRobotics wireless card and, after much grief, got it working under 
> Windows XP.

The primary question for determining hardware support under any
operating system:  What's the chipset?

In this case, a bit of googling reveals that it's a Texas Instruments
1130 (ACX111) chipset, a Cardbus (32-bit) card capable of the 802.11 a,
b, or g wireless standards.

As you'll see on
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Linux.Wireless.drivers.other.html
, Texas Instruments has consistently refused to cooperate with the Linux
community, making these cards (in my view) extremely undesirable.  The
ones to get, there days, appear to be those using Intersil "prism54"
chipsets.  Here's the place to look, _before_ buying:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Wireless.html

My sympathies to people who aren't aware of those issues, and make the
mistake of buying TI or Broadcom-based devices.  You might need to use
NdisWrapper (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/) in combination with
proprietary MS-Windows binary drivers, while waiting for developers of
the open-source ACX100 Linux driver to finish the ongoing task of
reverse-engineering the TI 1130.

Or you could just sell off the TI-based card on eBay, and buy a
prism54-based one to replace it.  That's what I'd do.

-- 
Cheers,                   The cynics among us might say:   "We laugh, 
Rick Moen                 monkeyboys -- Linux IS the mainstream UNIX now!
rick at linuxmafia.com       MuaHaHaHa!" but that would be rude. -- Jim Dennis