Suggestions for a Wireless Card

karatekid

Last month I found I needed to put a wireless network card in my desktop. Being impatient, I just wondered down to the local Circuit City and picked up something (instead of being a good little boy and doing my homework.) Also, being cheap, I picked up the Buffalo 54G wireless PCI card, because it was 10 bucks less than the Linksys and D-Link cards.

After a month of putting up with this thing, I can tell you my impatience and cheapness were a mistake. You see, this Buffalo card is nothing more than a big piece of @#$@#%@#^%@#$@%!$%@#$ . It drops the wireless connection all the time (even though the router is about 15 feet away and has a stronger than average single) and actually requires a reboot to get the connection back.

Another thing I have realized is that this card, and similar cards (such as the Linksys 54G card) use the Broadcom 43xx chipset, which doesn't play well with Linux.

So, now to my question (sorry for the ranting, it was overdue .) Do any of you guys have a suggestion for a wireless adapter for my desktop that will work well in Linux (especially with WPA) ?

kryyst

This used to be a good site to check http://www.linux-wlan.org/docs/wlan_adapters.html.gz but seems they haven't updated it now for some time.

Now though you can get a generic wrapper that will work with most wireless cards so getting a natively compatible one isn't as much of an issue.

Here's a pretty good site that gives a decent step by step. If you tell me what brand of linux your running though I might be able to give you better instructions.

http://www.utexas.edu/its/wireless/install/config_linux.html

Now as for your specific card I've never used a Buffalo wifi nic but I have used their wifi routers before and their NAS's and they've all performed nice and solid. There could be other issues going on that are causing your nic to drop it's connection.

Your-Amish-Daddy

I use the DLink AG108. Dunno how linux friendly it is; I only turn it on when I need to. Doesn't support WPA because of a driver limitation. Hardware wise I believe it can.