Compusa 54MB Wireless G PC Card for Fedora4

[Sam Varshavchik]

Min Chen writes:

> « HTML content follows »
> 
> 
> 
> On 11/27/05, Michael A. Peters 
> <<URL:mailto:mpeters at mac.com>mpeters at mac.com > wrote: 
> 
>    On Sun, 2005-11-27 at 16:00 -0800, Min Chen wrote:
>    > Hi --
>    >
>    > Fedora newbie just bought this PC card for hp omnibook 6000 notebook
>    > installed with Fedora 4.
>    
>    What card?
> 
> 
> It's Compusa 54 MB 802.11g wireless PCMCIA card. 

All that means that it's some unknown card manufactured in East Asia, that 
Compusa slapped their corporate logo on, this week.

Next week, Compusa will take another, cheaper wireless card from another 
East Asian manufacturer, slap their logo on, and sell it as "Compusa 54MB 
802.11g wireless PCMCIA card".

Furthermore, overall the 802.11g support on Linux is pretty much 
nonexistent.  802.11g cards use downloadable firmware code, which 
manufacturers typically refuse to release as open source.  There's been some 
posts on the linux-kernel mailing list that suggest that there might be some 
open source drivers for Broadcom-based 802.11g chipset, either 
reverse-engineered or actually developed with Broadcom's cooperation (I 
think I remember reading both kinds of rumors), released soon.  In the best 
possible scenario, I wouldn't expect them to show up any sooner than FC 6 or 
FC 7.

Anyway, the right way to buy any kind of Linux-compatible hardware is to 
obtain a list of known Linux-compatible hardware in advance, then, when 
going shopping, take the list with you and make sure that you buy only the 
hardware on your list.

Sorry, but your 802.11g card is most likely a doorstop.  There's only a 
the most remote chance that, if you determine your card's chipset, you might 
get lucky and be able to cobble something together, mostly with duct tape.  
Use the 'lspci' command to read your card's chipset.  If you don't have 
lspci command installed, install the pciutils RPM.  After you get your 
chipset IDed, go to Google and hope to get lucky.

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