PCI wireless card that works out of the box in Linux?

[thedarkwolf]

Cheap would be nice too 🙂. I could never get my old one to work and now I need a new one anyway.

 

[Goosemaster]

what linux distro...?

Ubuntu seems to be pretty good with eveything....

 

[cmetz]

thedarkwolf, get an Atheros card supported by MADWifi. That's the closest thing to working. Out of the box depends on your distro but even if you have to install the MADWifi drivers separately it's pretty easy.

I have prism54 and ralink cards also, they can be made to work but it's more painful.

 

[thedarkwolf]

Don't really care which distro. I'm actually installing Ubuntu rightnow since I haven't played around with it before. Just have a bunch of spare junk laying around and thought I might aswell do something with it so its garage computer time 🙂.

I'll look around for one of those cards.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Edimax 7128G. RALink is one of the only Linux compatible cards that doesn't require binary blobs like the atheros crap. It didn't work out of the box with Fedora, but the installation was pretty easy.

 

[blimey]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Edimax 7128G. RALink is one of the only Linux compatible cards that doesn't require binary blobs like the atheros crap. It didn't work out of the box with Fedora, but the installation was pretty easy.

Maybe, but I get much crappier performance from ralink based cards compared to Atheros. Suse 10.1 has integrated the network manager which supports atheros with wpa with a gui with no installation other than the madwifi drivers. Ralink with wpa is a super pain and extremely unreliable. Ralink without wpa or with wep is ok I guess.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: blimey

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Edimax 7128G. RALink is one of the only Linux compatible cards that doesn't require binary blobs like the atheros crap. It didn't work out of the box with Fedora, but the installation was pretty easy.

Maybe, but I get much crappier performance from ralink based cards compared to Atheros. Suse 10.1 has integrated the network manager which supports atheros with wpa with a gui with no installation other than the madwifi drivers. Ralink with wpa is a super pain and extremely unreliable. Ralink without wpa or with wep is ok I guess.

The RALink drivers are Free, that's important.

 

[thedarkwolf]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey
Edimax 7128G. RALink is one of the only Linux compatible cards that doesn't require binary blobs like the atheros crap. It didn't work out of the box with Fedora, but the installation was pretty easy.

After you posted that I remember the wireless card in my HTPC that I could never get to work with linux last year is an edimax 7128g 🙂. Since I needed to wipe that computer out anyway I slapped Ubuntu on it and it worked and I didn't have to do anything other then go into networking and tell it to enable the card. Now I just need to get Mythtv to work.