Linux Wireless

[Jonathan Hutchins]

On Monday 27 October 2003 01:10 pm, J. Mike Needham wrote:

> 1.) I have a Linksys wireless Ethernet adapter and not sure on how well
> supported this is, when last I looked, WIFI was not really supported,
> anybody got an idea?

Linux has good support for the older, more expensive 802.11b cards.  Support 
for 11b "turbo" or 22Mb mode is not as solid, but the Lynksys 2634 uses a TI 
chipset that has an independently developed driver that I've had working 
pretty well.  It wasn't entirely stable, and required careful steps to remove 
it without crashing, but it worked for normal networking.

The 802.11a cards are not well supported, and as far as I know none of the 
802.11g chipsets are supproted.

Supposedly both the 11b "turbo" and 11g cards have the ability to use areas of 
the spectrum that are reserved - possibly for "national security" use, hence 
they are afraid that if they release open-source drivers someone will hack 
the card into a government secret network or something.  That's the latest 
rumor anyway.