[mdlug] Wireless Adapter

[David D. Favro]

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!

> [...] 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.

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

Cheers,
David Favro