[ale] USB/802.11 experience

[Marvin Dickens]

On Saturday 27 March 2004 18:11, Bjorn Dittmer-Roche wrote:
> Is it easy to setup a USB/802.11 adaptor on linux? 

Yes, it is easy.  I have a small WiFi network that uses a Linksys WRT54G as 
the AP (Running the sveasoft firmware hack) to the internet and a Compaq 
Presario 2570US laptop (My wife's machine...) as well as three stand alone 
Intel Pentium class clones as clients.  This network performs flawlessly and 
is reasonably secure. The Compaq 2570US WiFI interface as well as the Linksys 
WiFI PCI cards installed in the stand alone machines are based on the 
Broadcom 94306 chip set. The setup was straight forward, painless and worked 
"out of the box" with both the laptop and the stand alone machines. As a side 
note, all machines, including the laptop have SuSE 9.0 installed, but I 
believe the ease of installation was not related to the distribution.

Documents and websites of interest (Which you really should read...) include 
the Linux wireless Howto which is located at:

http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Wireless.html

In the event native Linux drivers are not available for your card, other 
options to achieve functionality exist. Specifically,  a commercial venture 
funded by the Canadian company,? Linuxant  and the NdisWrapper project, which 
is open source. Both efforts have produced reliable, working source code (I 
have tried both modules), but I use the NdisWrapper code because it's open 
source. Here are the links:

http://www.linuxant.com/company/

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

Best 

Marvin Dickens