Many wireless card doesn't support Linux?

It is based on the card (chipset). Atheros support is often built in. Intel supplies drivers for Linux. Broadcom doesn't support Linux, but can be used by using the Windows drivers with ndiswrapper.

If you haven't already noticed, there is a LOT of hardware being marketed that works perfectly well with Linux and the bastards are afraid to admit it!!

Use ndiswrapper (ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net) with the XP driver. wpa_supplicant works for WPA encryption.

There may be native drivers for your card. You do not tell us which Lynksys card it is so we cannot tell you. HOwever if necessary you can also use ndiswrapper or driverloader (from linuxant-- $20 for a license) to use the windows wireless driver under linux. They work quite well. (PS-- upgrade your redhat. It is not old and out of security updates)

i have the linksys wpc54g working fine under debian. it worked fine under fedora core 2,3 and 4. the linksys wpc11 worked under fedora core 2.

I have a Netgear WG511. And tried many flavours of Linux. After looking around many newsgroups, it was possible to get it to work (sort of) using NDiswrapper: After boot up and login, I have to open a command prompt and enter lots of commands which frankly are beyond my comprehension. NDiswrapper is not trivial to install and configure, so as a Linux newbie, I would not recommend using it to other newbies.

After that I started looking at websites (Mandriva, fedora and Suse are amongst those I tried), to find pcmcia wifi cards that could be purchased in the UK. It's quite frustrating as some of the cards listed are meant to use ndiswrapper. The lists are not very easy to search either, and in the end I haven't found any card that is a doddle to install and use with Linux.

I have no idea why most manufacturers don't mention Linux for their cards. After all, it's mainstream now, and surely there is a demand from many bozos like me who are ready to buy another card, iff it works with Linux. Also, Linux distributors could do a bteer job with their hardware databases. So I'm reluctantly back to using Windows XP. Very frustrating.

Well, as of this writing, 802.11g isn't supported by the mainstream release kernel.

However, many 802.11b cards are supported. A good way to figure out if a particular card is supported is to check your distro's web site- for example, RedHat/Fedora and SuSE have very explicit lists as to what is supported. My favorite way to figure out if a card is supported is to look at the card's chipset- Lucent/Orinoco/Agere and Harris/Prism/Prism II work right out of the box with any recent releases of SuSE, Knoppix, Debian, or Redhat.

You can get a wealth of info by looking at the top five hits for a google web search for Linux Wireless- the information is well written, and is updated frequently. Also, just putting your card model and the name of your Linux ditsro into google search terms works quite well. (in my case, MA311 SuSE)

Hope this helps.

It's not because they're bastards. It's because they are intimidated my MS and that makes them bastards.

Many hardware items work perfectly well with Linux, and they should know that. All they need is to put a penguin on the box - is that so damned hard?

For some odd reason, I expect people who use Linux to be smart enough to google. I'm continually disappointed.

Google for "Linux" and your card model. You'll find lots of pages that say "I couldn't get it to work", but if it really is supported you'll find a few that tell you how.

Nobody ever advertises Linux support on their hardware. It's not because (as one poster said) they're bastards - it's because they couldn't possibly test it with every possible flavor of Linux - or BSD.

Personally, when I went shopping for a laptop, the first thing was to find some suitable models, the second was to google for "Linux" and all the various subsystems to make sure it would work - and I specifically chose the wireless NIC, from one of three available on that model, because it was a known-to-work Intel type.

Yeah, you're right. I should never say "nobody". Sweeping generalizations are always false. :-)

That's true, and many vendors aren't interested in the small return they'll get from catering to the *nix market - and that's they're right and choice.

Some vendors though (Oracle comes to mind) will advertise support for very specific Linux configurations. Of course, I also have three routers that, under hardware requirements, tell you "Windows", when their only real requirement is that you have _one_ computer capable of running an HTML 3.1 compliant browser (HTML 4 for best effects).

And that's what most of the people who do advertise that a product will work on, at least some brand of, Linux count on.

Really? Oh, damn. Now I'm going to have to throttle back the speed on my card.

My intel ipw2200g works just fine, and afaik, many other people are not having any trouble.

What do you consider the "mainstream release kernel" - according to kernel.org it's 2.6.13.2 which is considerably newer than my kernel.

I think there's another reason Derek. Why bother? No really, it's not the dominant desktop OS so why bother developing and advertising for a small market? Any company will want to maximise revenue from development and marketing effort and if that means it's to gain Windows logo certification then so be it.

Why deploy your developers onto a Linux build when by releasing some source code snippets and documentation, someone out there will write a free driver, unpaid by the manufacturer who probably sees little ROI on a Linux driver build!

Like you said, there's an element of people running Linux wanting to both develop and provide support for devices so a Google usually works.

David.

Not quite true - a couple of manufacturers do advertise Linux compatability. Safecom for one. Have a look at the web page for one of their USB dongles:

Especially when the driver author probably released it under the GPL.

LOL. I'd like to see that, or even better a note that "this product has been reported to work with Linux..."

RH9 is quite old. You might do better with a more recent distro.

HTH.

E.S.

They may work well and in no way am I knocking Linux.

If they say it works under Linux, they need to provide the drivers and support and those cost. The market for that support isn't big enough when someone else probably wrote the drivers.

If someone needs to see a picture of a penguin on the box to find out if it's going to work, then they aren't the sort of person who is then going to be able to find and install the driver support. Those that want to know, will be able to find whether certain hardware is supported beforehand or not.

Perhaps they should put a sentence on the box that says:-

"This product might work with linux, the drivers are not written or supported by us, you'll need to find them via Google and contact the author for support".

David.

Why is it that you have to enter these commands manually and cannot add them to your network start script?

Sander