Douglas Phillipson wrote:
What wireless cards work with FC4 out of the box? I'd rather not have
to install any drivers. Please use common names, not chipsets in
responses unless you provide both.
Thank you, I really appreciate your help
Doug P
At the risk of sounding like a former president of the USA in one of his
more inglorious moments--it depends on what the meaning of the phrase
"out-of-the-box" is. /No/ wireless card, AFAIK, will work without /some/
form of kernel module or driver wrapper to address it.
That said, I recommend the Netgear family of wireless cards, together
with the kernel-module-madwifi package appropriate to whatever kernel
you wish to run. These kernel modules are available on the livna
repository, and they work. I use them myself.
Netgear uses chipsets built by Atheros Communications. I recommend that
you go to the site http://www.atheros.com/ and run their excellent
Product Search routine. You will find that Netgear is hardly the only
wireless card maker to use Atheros chips--and you can even select
specific models of cards, addressing whatever band you want to be on
(802.11 a, b, and/or g). The list of companies, and card models, that
should work with the kernel-module-madwifi packages is far too
voluminous to post here--which goes to show that that chip has gotten
very popular indeed.
You will no doubt also be interested in what models of laptop, that
often have built-in wireless interfaces, will work with Fedora and these
kernel modules. The Product Search will help you there, too. Sony
(including the VAIO family of laptops), Toshiba, IBM, NEC, HP/Compaq,
and Fujitsu are the six brand names to choose here. (Warning: Dell is
/not/ among those brands. I bought a Dell Inspiron, that did /not/ have
built-in wireless, and then bought a Netgear card to make it connect.)
Temlakos
