Wireless Support

[benguru]

How good is the wireless support? Does anyone know if a Microsoft MN-510 works out of the box?

[mea]

A company named Linuxant (www.linuxant.com) has a product called a driver loaded that will allow you to use your Windows XP wireless card drivers under Linux. You can try it for free for 30 days and pay $20 for an unlimited license. I use it with my Linksys wpc54g card and it will also work with the Linksys wpc11 version 4 card. It is well worth the $20 dollars to have my wireless card working under Linux. The driver loaded is reported to work with just about any wireless card. Under Fedora, for some reason, I must remove and re-insert my wireless card after booting to get it to connect to my Linksys access point. I didn't need to do that under Redhat 9. A minor nuisance. Other than that, it works perfectly. I am not an open source purist. I don't mind having to pay $20 to get my wireless hardware running under Linux.

[joe.pelayo]

Back on topic, nowadays there is quite good support in many wireless cards, notably Intel ones (I think natively) and through projects some others, madwifi for example allows to use Atheros cards. If things get worst with rare devices there is ndiswrapper to use Windows drivers with. But there is a restriction, ndiswrapper in a 64 bit system can not take advantage of Windows's 32 bit drivers.

This could be sort of a good conclusion for an old thread with unsatisfactory answer.

[light speed]

So this is why I cannot get ndiswrapper to work in fc 8 i386? Hmmm then how can one get wifi working on the i386 (32bit) fc8? Please see my post under networking.

[bbfuller]

Hello light speed

I doubt that is your problem if you are seeing 386, 586 or 686 in your package descriptions.

This is specifically a problem if you have installed the x86_64 which is a 64 bit version of the distribution. Even if you have a machine with a 64 bit processor in it you can still use a 32 bit distribution and then the restriction joe.pelayo mentioned doesn't apply.