pci wireless support under linux

[pitupepito2000]

Hi,

I just got a netgear wireless router WGR614 v3 from a friend. This wireless router is going to be downstairs in a room with 2 computers, and upstairs I have another computer, which I want to connect wirelessly . Of course I want to put linux in the computer upstairs, so I'm asking you gurus a couple of questions:

1) which wireless pci adapter (brand or model) has the best support under linux?
2) this router support "Speeds of 802.11g - up to 5x faster than 802.11b", which standard should I go with for linux?

thanks,
pitupepito

 

[n0cmonkey]

802.11b seems to have the best support. Prism, orinoco, and cisco chipsets are probably the best supported. I have a Netgear MA311 (or something close to that) that works quite well under OpenBSD.

As far as G goes, the prism54 chipset is fairly well supported. Some atheros chipsets are supported. A couple of others should be mentioned I'm sure, but I don't pay that much attention when I google this stuff for people every couple of days.

 

[drag]

I have 2 prism54-based wireless cards

The original manufacture of the chipset was nice enough to make it's own GPL'd drivers. And they have been since tweaked and improved considurably.

They are in the vanilla kernel as of 6.6.5 I beleive (around their).

With fedora core 2 they were recognized immediately and the modules were loaded automaticly. The only catch is that you have to download a seperate firmware package (which I think is OK, a little irritating, but lots better then what Nvidia or ATI does) and copy it to a particular folder and rename it to a particular name.

It's been dead on reliable with one exeption the original kernel for Fedora had trouble with my PCMCIA device, but updating it 6.6.8-1 (from dag's rpm repository thru apt I think, could be official Fedora) solved all the problems.

Any newer distro with a recent 2.6 kernel revision should get it going automaticly except for the firmware thing.

All in all I am very happy with it. I have 2, one PCI version setup in my mythtv frontend as a wireless to twisted wire ethernet bridge, and the other is a pcmcia version in my laptop.

They are SMC cards and reasonably priced. Although lots of other companies have them. As far as I am concerned these are the best wireless chipsets you can get for linux. I don't know how well the compare performance-wise to other cards, but they worked fine with me.

Unfortunately I can't get a accurate assement of the distance they can go, because my current house has metal siding, so the microwave signals can only escape thru the doors and windows. Plus the mythtv box is in the basement. But it penatrates thru the floor well, and most of the time I get 100%-90% signals.

Actually I get better reception thru the floor then I get in the same room... I think it's because the pci card's antenna is behind the metal computer case, and on one side is my old compaq router with a old disconnected monitor sitting on top of that, and on the other side of the case is my TV screen (with it's big metal pixel screen) so the signal gets blocked quite a bit by all this metal sitting right in front of it.

but even then there is only realy one small "cold spot" in the room. I figure it's kinda like inside a microwave oven. I'll probably get a remote antenna and stick it up in one of the windows, and that way I'll be able to get outside reception well and that'll fix the cold spot.

So that's my experiance with them. I like those cards.

 

[pitupepito2000]

Thanks for the reply n0cmonkey , I also did a google search, and I came up with a few good resources. I'm probably going to to go with a G card because it's so much faster than B.

Anybody else got opinions?
Thanks,
pitupepito

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: drag
I have 2 prism54-based wireless cards

The original manufacture of the chipset was nice enough to make it's own GPL'd drivers. And they have been since tweaked and improved considurably.

Intersil was the original, but I think they got bought out by conexant or broadcom, both of whome are hostile towards FOSS.

One of the 802.11G chipsets had a driver released under a BSD license too, but I can't remember which one it was for sure. Still requires a firmware upload though.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: pitupepito2000
Thanks for the reply n0cmonkey , I also did a google search, and I came up with a few good resources. I'm probably going to to go with a G card because it's so much faster than B.

Anybody else got opinions?
Thanks,
pitupepito

I've only used B. It's plenty fast for me most of the time (although I'm thinking of upgrading the desktops to gigabit ).

I figured you had searched google. Do a quick search here (OS forum). There have been a thread or two on this recently, and I've linked a site or two. Not sure if any of those are worth while though. I'll take a quick look later after some sleep.

 

[drag]

Intersel was the ones that developed the chipset and the original driver. They were very big player in the 802.11 stuff at the time, and eventually they sold their chipset stuff to Globespan.

Globespan at least agreed to let Prism54.org freely distribute the firmware from it's website, but since then Intel and Broadcom decided that they wanted to compete heavily. Faced with this Globespan did a merger with Conexant.

So basicly Conexant is the owner of the chipset design, but the coporation of Globespan still exists.. maybe as just a subsidiary. Not sure.

As far as the BSD driver was concerned your probably thinking of the company Atheros

from here

Sam, with the help of Atheros, had created a BSD driver for those cards some time ago. Unfortunately, he was unable to release it because of the FCC regulations. The Atheros hardware is basic and doesn't enforce that valid operating parameters are set (such as frequency and power level), however the FCC mandate that end user should not be able to set invalid operating parameters. Eventually, Atheros managed to find a solution that was acceptable : they create a HAL, a binary layer that would sit between the hardware and the driver and enforce that FCC regulations are respected. The downside is that the HAL is available only for selected architectures (i386 only at this point).

The FCC is teh suck. Probalby helps explain why the firmware on these cards are still closed source (in some cases)

Probably have more of this BS to look forward to when HDTV cards start to get popular and the "cable card" (a card that all cable companies that are forced to support now due to regulations that allows people without cable boxes to be able to communicate with the cable companies' propriatory networks to get full cable service. No more cable company lock-out and forced subscription to cable boxes to get digital signals... The FCC rocks!!) It's a pcmcia form factor card, and all high-end HDTV tv sets support it's function. Of course the cable companies aren't happy about it, and they tout that you won't get all the features that buying a cable box would get you... like the ability to waste even more money on pay-per-view. (a little off topic, but it's related because of the introduction of the HDTV restriction recording flag, that stops the ability for devices to record certain types of broadcasts. Something that was pushed by evil coporations like the Public Broadcasting Corporation so you'd be forced to buy their DVDs to get recordings of their programs)

see here

I realy want Linux support for this cable card technology.. because I want HDTV and want to be able to tell the Cable companies to go get f-d...

I want to get one of these.... GREAT STUFF. But I only have 2 (maybe one) station in my area that does HDTV broadcasts, and this won't work with cable because of the propriatory networks and communication systems they have setup.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: drag
Intersel was the ones that developed the chipset and the original driver. They were very big player in the 802.11 stuff at the time, and eventually they sold their chipset stuff to Globespan.

Globespan at least agreed to let Prism54.org freely distribute the firmware from it's website, but since then Intel and Broadcom decided that they wanted to compete heavily. Faced with this Globespan did a merger with Conexant.

So basicly Conexant is the owner of the chipset design, but the coporation of Globespan still exists.. maybe as just a subsidiary. Not sure.

As far as the BSD driver was concerned your probably thinking of the company Atheros

from here

Sam, with the help of Atheros, had created a BSD driver for those cards some time ago. Unfortunately, he was unable to release it because of the FCC regulations. The Atheros hardware is basic and doesn't enforce that valid operating parameters are set (such as frequency and power level), however the FCC mandate that end user should not be able to set invalid operating parameters. Eventually, Atheros managed to find a solution that was acceptable : they create a HAL, a binary layer that would sit between the hardware and the driver and enforce that FCC regulations are respected. The downside is that the HAL is available only for selected architectures (i386 only at this point).

The FCC is teh suck. Probalby helps explain why the firmware on these cards are still closed source (in some cases)

Yeah, that was it. This could all be solved by putting the firmware ON THE CARD where it belongs, instead of in the driver.

 

[drag]

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: drag
Intersel was the ones that developed the chipset and the original driver. They were very big player in the 802.11 stuff at the time, and eventually they sold their chipset stuff to Globespan.

Globespan at least agreed to let Prism54.org freely distribute the firmware from it's website, but since then Intel and Broadcom decided that they wanted to compete heavily. Faced with this Globespan did a merger with Conexant.

So basicly Conexant is the owner of the chipset design, but the coporation of Globespan still exists.. maybe as just a subsidiary. Not sure.

As far as the BSD driver was concerned your probably thinking of the company Atheros

from here

Sam, with the help of Atheros, had created a BSD driver for those cards some time ago. Unfortunately, he was unable to release it because of the FCC regulations. The Atheros hardware is basic and doesn't enforce that valid operating parameters are set (such as frequency and power level), however the FCC mandate that end user should not be able to set invalid operating parameters. Eventually, Atheros managed to find a solution that was acceptable : they create a HAL, a binary layer that would sit between the hardware and the driver and enforce that FCC regulations are respected. The downside is that the HAL is available only for selected architectures (i386 only at this point).

The FCC is teh suck. Probalby helps explain why the firmware on these cards are still closed source (in some cases)

Yeah, that was it. This could all be solved by putting the firmware ON THE CARD where it belongs, instead of in the driver.

Yes probably, but having loadable firmware has it's advantages. There were some bug fixes and stuff integrated into the firmware that didn't exist in older versions, these fixes are now aviable to all users instead of the ones that happenned to buy the latest revision of hardware. I figure that makes the driver maintainer's life a little bit easier.. instead of having layers of bugfixes they just tell people to load the latest firmware on their machines... it's as simple as unloading a module and copying the new firmware into the correct directory with the correct name.

 

[pitupepito2000]

Thanks, guys. Well so far, I have been up since midnight and right now is 4:39 am and I'm still reading things to come up with the best card. It seems that prism54 supports quite a lot of cards and it has the module in the regular kernel from kernel.org. I did searches in these forums, the fedora, and mandrake. It seems that the best format to get would be 802.11g over the 802.11b because of it's speed (which is better for upgradability of the network in the far away future. The 802.11b has the advantage that is older and because of that better supported.

Most of the places that I got my info was from google, this thread, fedora and mandrake forums, make menuconfig. Also I found out that no matter what card I choose I can use a module wrapper to get windows drivers to work under linux.

I'm thinking of getting a prism54 card or some other card that has native support under linux instead of using the wrapper that will allow me to use windows drivers. Am I doing this correctly? Does it even make a difference? How about speed? I always try to buy things that are supported under windows, so I'm not winning when they don't play nice with the pinguin

What's your opinion?

 

[drag]

go native every time. The ndis wrapper is stop-gap at best.

 

[pitupepito2000]

I'm getting confused. From the following
website it pretty much says that a whole bunch of wirless adapters. What's the difference of the support of these cards compared to the ones based on the prism54 which support all Prism GT, Prism Duette and Prism Indigo chipset based wireless cards.

I don't know if I should try to stick with the ones based on the prism chipset or just pick whatever is the cheapest card from that huge list that I linked above.

Thanks,
pitupepito

 

[drag]

Look at the speed 802.11b v 802.11g and that.

Then look at the specifications on what sort of modes these things are capable of. My cards support: Managed, Master, Ad-hoc. Thats the modes I know it supports for sure.

Other modes include repeater and secondary.

Not all cards are capable of supporting Master especially, which allows your to use your computer as a wireless access point. Lots of cards can't support the ability to sniff networks, for instance.

I use prism54 because I appreciate companies that give GPL'd drivers. Plus I know it works and will do what I want it to do.

As for other chipsets, I don't know anything about them.

And also don't get "prism" cards mixed up with "prism54" or "prism2". These are all very different card chipsets. I am sure there is some wireless-specific forum you can go to if you need deeper advice on the subject.. I just don't know much about wireless stuff in general.

If you want specific information on different chipsets and drivers check out this guy's page

That is the most comprehensive guide to wireless drivers in linux that I am aware off.

 

[n0cmonkey]

Originally posted by: drag

Originally posted by: n0cmonkey

Originally posted by: drag
Intersel was the ones that developed the chipset and the original driver. They were very big player in the 802.11 stuff at the time, and eventually they sold their chipset stuff to Globespan.

Globespan at least agreed to let Prism54.org freely distribute the firmware from it's website, but since then Intel and Broadcom decided that they wanted to compete heavily. Faced with this Globespan did a merger with Conexant.

So basicly Conexant is the owner of the chipset design, but the coporation of Globespan still exists.. maybe as just a subsidiary. Not sure.

As far as the BSD driver was concerned your probably thinking of the company Atheros

from here

Sam, with the help of Atheros, had created a BSD driver for those cards some time ago. Unfortunately, he was unable to release it because of the FCC regulations. The Atheros hardware is basic and doesn't enforce that valid operating parameters are set (such as frequency and power level), however the FCC mandate that end user should not be able to set invalid operating parameters. Eventually, Atheros managed to find a solution that was acceptable : they create a HAL, a binary layer that would sit between the hardware and the driver and enforce that FCC regulations are respected. The downside is that the HAL is available only for selected architectures (i386 only at this point).

The FCC is teh suck. Probalby helps explain why the firmware on these cards are still closed source (in some cases)

Yeah, that was it. This could all be solved by putting the firmware ON THE CARD where it belongs, instead of in the driver.

Yes probably, but having loadable firmware has it's advantages. There were some bug fixes and stuff integrated into the firmware that didn't exist in older versions, these fixes are now aviable to all users instead of the ones that happenned to buy the latest revision of hardware. I figure that makes the driver maintainer's life a little bit easier.. instead of having layers of bugfixes they just tell people to load the latest firmware on their machines... it's as simple as unloading a module and copying the new firmware into the correct directory with the correct name.

New firmware could be included in the driver installation/upgrade, and actually flash it on the card.

 

[Crusty]

I have a DWL-G650 in my lappy. I compiled madwifi drivers against a 2.4.26 kernel and haven't had a single problem.

 

[singh]

Tried a Belkin wireless PCI card (802.11b I think) a couple of weeks ago using the latest Knoppix CD. Worked flawlessly and was a breeze to set-up via iwconfig including WEP :thumbsup:

 

[pitupepito2000]

thanks for all the responses guys. This has been a learning experience for me.
Drag do you mind if I ask you what wireless model pci do you have?

Thanks,
pitupepito