Neil Cherry wrote:
Temlakos wrote:
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.
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.
I think he meant that he didn't want to d/l something, compile and
install it. Rather he wanted something that is already in Fedora.
I'm not that's going to be possible (I'm not that knowledgeable in
this area). What I have done is to use ndiswrapper (a pain but
workable) and I just got a Netgear WG311T and hope to not have to
use the ndiswrapper as I'm writing a book and I'd like to have the
correct info for the ndiswrapper (I have 2 boards for that) and the
info for a native driver (MadWiFi?).
Here's a link to boards that work with MadWiFi:
http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility
I'm not sure this will fit your needs exactly but I hope it helps.
BTW, before you curse the Linux community under your breath the
blame for the WiFi problems should fall on the manufacturers of
the chip sets as they are the ones who are not sharing. I've
fought with the NDIS, the closed source drivers and even
incompatible cards (an Intel 2200 won't work in an AMD
machine, the BIOS won't let you boot).
Well, actually, I was suggesting that he install the
kernel-module-madwifi package via yum or smart or apt-rpm, by
configuring one of those package managers to use the Livna repository. I
certainly didn't mean to suggest building from source! Just make sure
that the kernel version number for the kernel and kernel-module-madwifi
packages match (and also that you're using the correct architecture),
and you're good to go.
And I agree with you: the fault for the chronic WiFi problems lies with
manufacturers who won't cooperate with the open-source movement. And
cooperation makes good business sense! (Were that not so, then giants
like HP and Epson would never have cooperated, and we would not have
available to us the excellent printer and scanner drivers for HP and
Epson machines that we have today.) As computer users become
increasingly fed up with Microsoft's upgrade policies--not to mention
their constant security holes and bugs--manufacturers will face a stark
choice: cooperate or lose market share.
(But speaking of bugs--if the Open Office group will just solve their
repeated random crashes...!)
Temlakos
