[Daniel] Linux Wireless

Tonight was a bit of an adventure. Moriah and I went into Fry's Electronics for her first time and my second. There is so very much there to see! Much larger (and somewhat better stocked) than Best Buy. However, there was purpose to our visit and we hurried through most of the store to get to it.



Part of my birthday monies were put toward a PCI wireless card that I intended to use with Ubuntu. Anyone familar with Linux will recognize that this is a difficult task. Most network card manufacturers refuse to publish specifications for their cards so that people can write drivers (for free at the expense of their own free time!) so the cards may be used under the various free operating systems. However, in a sea of basically unusable crap, thanks to speaking with a supervisor, we found a card that he claimed would work with Linux.



The card is an Airlink 101 Super-G Wireless PCI Adapter - AWLH4030. It uses an Atheros chipset. Once we got it home, setting up the card was dead simple.

1. Shut down Ubuntu (5.10 - "Breezy Badger").



2. Open case.



3. Install card.



4. Close case.



5. Start Ubuntu.

Note how the list stopped there. UBUNTU PICKED THE CARD UP ON BOOT AND LOADED THE MODULE WITHOUT ISSUE. I logged in, went to "Administration" -> "Networking", and there was the card, fully recognized in the list and (with a little configuration) working.



I was amazed because I remember the days when getting even a wired networking card installed and running took several hours of hunting down drivers, extracting and compiling then debugging the damn thing till it worked. Needless to say, I was blown away.



My only complaint is that I was unable to get WEP working with the card. I'm trying to integrate it with our Airport Extreme and I believe it handles WEP keys differently for Macs versus PCs. I'm anticipating the release of Ubuntu 6.06 - "Dapper Drake" later next week to see if that will improve my situation.



The Airlink 101 (though generic looking) is awesome. I thought I had hours of pain ahead of me and instead enjoyed a mere 30 minutes as it just worked. Kudos to the Linux device driver writers and to Airlink/Atheros for a good chipset.