[mdlug] Wireless Adapter

[Peter Bart]

On Sun, 2006-12-03 at 12:53 -0500, David D. Favro wrote:
> On Sat, 02 Dec 2006 15:10:29 -0500, Peter Bart <peter at petertheplumber.net> wrote:
> > [...] after many frustrating nights trying to get a Linksys to play
> > with Linux.
> 
> Almost any WiFi card can be made to work under Linux if you're willing to resort to NDISwrapper, 
> and with a little elbow grease most of them can be made to do so without it.  So... I'll take that 
> Linksys off your hands if you don't want it! :-)  I mean, smiley, but really!

I thought of that too, sadly after I took out my aggression on it. I'll
have to keep these things in mind for next time, sorry.


> 
> > [...] The D-Link [...] is reported to contain an Atheros chip,
> > I cannot confirm or deny that.
> 
> Look at the output of 'lspci': if it is Atheros, you should see a line something like:
> 	0:0d.0 Ethernet controller: Atheros Communications, Inc. <...more-details-here...>
> If it is *not* Atheros, there will be a similar line for the card, but listing the actual chipset.

Yes, about 30 seconds after posting that I realized that, it was in all
the how-to's I followed. It does in fact have an Atheros 5212 chip.

> 
> Atheros cards do work fairly well under Linux via the madwifi (http://madwifi.org/) driver, 
> but they are sometimes frowned upon because the driver utilizes a proprietary HAL 
> ("Hardware Abstraction Layer").  This is why it is not included in the vanilla kernel, 
> and under Ubuntu I think you need to install some kind of restricted-kernel-modules package, 
> although from what you say maybe it is installed by default.  Look in the output of 
> 'dmesg | grep -i ath' and you will likely see something like:
> 	ath_hal: module license 'Proprietary' taints kernel

The output does state that. I'm not sure if I should be concerned? As
far as using it all I did was plug it in, no setup, no scripts, no
copying files, nothing. It just worked.

> 
> Cheers,
> David Favro

-- 
Peter Bart <peter at petertheplumber.net>
http://petertheplumber.net