Wireless Woes

[rshol]

My venerable Linksys WPC11 v.1 is about the bite the dust. I need to buy a wireless card, but want to avoid as much hassle as possible.

I'm running fully updated FC1 on a Dell Latitude C840. I'd like to buy a card that I can put in, configure from the network setup GUI and have work right out of the box without having to configure scripts, sacrifice a chicken, draw a pentagram, or recompile the kernel. Is there such a card? If so, what is it.

I've tried and can't get a WPC11v.3 to work. I also have a WPC11v.4 and understand that a driver has been released. I tried to install this driver but gave up after several hours.

[ieatlint]

Orinoco/Lucent/Dell cards are generally the best. Those 3 are actually all the same chip using the orinoco_cs module, which is a module already included with rh's kernel packages.

Cisco is also supposed to be very Linux friednly, although I've never used them.

Predictably, orinoco and cisco cards are the most expensive (cisco cards especially)...
A 802.11b orinoco silver card (64bit encryption) was running $80 a year ago, not sure how much now. Good tip is to take faulty (or extra) WAP's and just open them up. They contain standard PCMCIA cards which work perfectly fine in computers, and can be replaced right back into the PCMCIA socket on the AP later...

[morr]

If you can't get a card to work with all the graphical utilities (I never mess with them much anyway), I have a NetGear WAG511 that works well with FC1 with the madwifi drivers. I had to modify scripts to get it to work with 'ifup/ifdown', but once done it works quite well.