Richy <eric1i@xxxxxxx> writes: > I plan to use wireless network with my Fedora Core 1 at home. I got two > PC in my home, one used by my wife is a laptop with winxp, the other > desktop with fedora used by myself. I want to install a wireless LAN in > my home and connect to internet by ADSL. > > So, it seems that I need a wireless access point with ADSL and a > wireless pci card. Is there any suggestion about purchase a wireless pci > card for my fedora? I usually find buy a hardware for linux need more > attention. First, find the book "Drive by Wifi" by Jeff Duntemann. It introduces some basic concepts. The main concept about wireless you need to know is that "physics is more important than architecture". Also, look at the websites for seattlewireless.net and personaltelco.net ; a lot of good Linux stuff. In most cases, an antenna on the back of a metal case PC, near the floor, is not a good idea. The 2.4GHz (or 5GHz) radio waves are not broadcast where you need them. Thus, a PCI card is probably not what you want. Cable to a seperate antenna? Every connector loses about 1dB = 15% of your range, and cable losses to a separately-mounted antenna are very high unless you use expensive, hard-to-find cable. The antenna wants to be next to the access point, and the access point wants to be mounted up high with a clear line of sight to the likely locations the laptop will be used. High gain antennas just re-arrange the coverage areas, so they do not compensate for cable losses unless you can get by with lots of dead spots. So, you want to use a discrete and separate access point (WAP), fed by ethernet and wall-transformer power, so you can mount the device wherever you want, with a couple of low-frequency cables (100BT is low frequency!) running to it. WAP's run their own internal software, typically do DHCP and firewall and WEP security and a lot of other stuff, and are configured by a web browser, independently of any operating system. I am running a cheap Siemens Speedstream SS2624, but I have set up a couple of Linksys BEFW11S4's for others and prefer those. Some people are running Linksys WRT54G's, which run Linux inside the box and are capable of much fancy reprogramming, but you may not need another hobby. With only an ADSL connection to the net, 802.11b is more robust (though slower) than the faster but more fragile (and expensive) 802.11g . The one place you may need speed is for network backups. That probably requires a hard connection anyway. So sometimes your wife will be plugging the laptop into a 100BT ethernet cable connected to the backup server - any form of wireless will be too slow for this. Security and WEP is too big a subject to fit into an email. WEP isn't perfect but a lot better than nothing. Look at Duntemann. If your wife will someday move from Windoze to Linux, you will want a PCMCIA card with good Linux drivers. The best right now are the Senao 200mW Prism-2 based cards. These are rebranded with many names - the seattlewireless site has good pointers. The best in the near future will probably be the Atheros chipset - a lot of good open-source people working on drivers for that. Some chipsets are hard to find good Linux drivers for, and unfortunately some companies frequently change chipsets without changing model numbers (sadly, Dlink and Netgear and Siemens do this a lot - avoid!). For the rest of you running a prism chipset under Linux, use the hostap drivers in client mode - these are (from experience) more usable than the wlan-ng drivers. I hope that helps. You will find plenty of opposing opinions, especially about the usefulness of PCI cards. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom keithl@xxxxxxxx Voice (503)-520-1993 KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon" Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs
