Which PCI Wireless card
Mark Knecht
markknecht at gmail.com
Sat Jan 15 00:02:16 UTC 2005
On Fri, 14 Jan 2005 15:32:44 -0500, Scot L. Harris <webid at cfl.rr.com> wrote:
> On Fri, 2005-01-14 at 04:56, Nicholas Comino wrote:
>
> > That's a PCMCIA card (not PCI), will ndiswrapper result in pretty much the
> > same driver for the dwl-G520+??
> >
> > Is that wireless driver solution as good as it gets?
>
> The real trick with any wireless card is to sort out which chip set the
> card uses. Also don't assume that two of the same model card has the
> same chip set, check that they are the same versions. Vendors will use
> different chip sets on the same model cards and slap a version number on
> that denotes the change. This usually means you have to use different
> drivers.
This is good advise. I had a DWL-520 working in my son's machine so I
went to the store and bought a second one. Turned out the new one
wasn't the same chipset and it didn't work.
DWL-520 - Rev D2 == Realtek 802.11b - works great with ndiswrapper and
does not need to have the kernel compiled with >4K stack sizes.
DWL-520 - Rev. E1 == Prism 2.5 chipset. Doesn't work with ndiswrapper
AFAICT and doesn't even seem to work with the Prism driver for me.
>
> There are native drivers available for some chip sets like Atheros and
> Prism chip sets. Others you have to use ndiswrapper which lets you use
> the windows drivers for those chips sets (broadcom is an example).
As per the above, I had trouble this week with the Prism 2.5 chipset
on FC3. Maybe it works better elsewhere but for me no go.
>
> So figure out which chip set the card uses then find the appropriate
> driver for that chipset.
>
Again, good advise.
- Mark
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