[mdlug] wireless on older laptop

[Raymond S McLaughlin]

David Lee Lambert wrote:
> I have a Compaq Armada m700 as well (actually I'm on my 3rd one... the screen 
> on the first one got cracked from sitting under luggage,  and the internal 
> power-supply on the second eventually died).  I'm using a Netgear 802.11b 
> PCMCIA card with a "Broadcom Corporation BCM43XG (rev 01)" chipset with 
> pretty good results.
> 
> I run Debian Etch on it.  
> 
> --
> DLL

Are you using the mad-wifi driver, or the ndiswrapper-windriver
combination? I am using a Linksys cardbus card with the following lspci
-v description:


06:00.0 Network controller: Atheros Communications Inc. AR5416 \
802.11abgn Wireless PCI Adapter (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Linksys Device 0069
        Flags: bus master, fast Back2Back, 66MHz, medium devsel,\
latency   128, IRQ 11
        Memory at 3c000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64K]
        Capabilities: [40] #80 [0000]
        Kernel driver in use: ndiswrapper
        Kernel modules: ath5k


The Atheros chipset *used to be* (like 5 years ago) well supported with
native Linux drivers drivers, but then they weren't so I got used to
using NDISWrapper. I have read that Atheros Communications Inc. has
resumed co-operating with the open source community, but I have still
found the mad-wifi drivers problematic every time I've tried to use
them, while NDISWrapper now works well.

If you need to use NDISW I suggest you get a couple of packages in
addition to the base NDISW: ndisgtk and ndisinstaller. These provide a
convenient gui front end for configuring NDISWrapper. On my laptop I set
it up once for the present card, and it has "just worked" since then.


I hope this helps
Raymond McLaughlin