[Cialug] PCI Wireless Card

[David Champion]

In my limited experience with pci wireless cards, I'd say the antenna on 
them is not better - just because it looks better. I used a d-link card 
(don't recall the model off-hand, but a 802.11b card) and the reception 
on it was terrible. I think part of this is because the antenna is 
hidden behind your PC, and that can be a lot of metal to try to get a 
signal thru.

As far as other wireless goes... the pcmcia cards I'm using now are an 
old-school Orinico (prism2), and a d-link that uses the TI ACX100 
chipset. The ACX100 driver is pretty good now - it requires the firmware 
file from the Windows driver (simlar to how the Hauppage PVR cards do 
it) but the driver itself is linux native, unlike the ndis wrapper driver.

-dc

Nathan C. Smith wrote:
> No, that's a good question.  The prism devices I've used have shown up as
> eth devices.  But those have been PC cards, not PCI.  Most of the PCI cards
> are just PC card adapters with a better antenna, so An educated guess would
> say eth.
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Theron Conrey [mailto:theron@conrey.org] 
> Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 11:22 AM
> To: cialug@cialug.org
> Subject: Re: [Cialug] PCI Wireless Card
> 
> 
> 
> nope. just using the TV.  Do you know if the linksys cards view it as a 
> wlan device or eth device?
> 
> 
> 
> Nathan C. Smith wrote:
> 
> 
>>You don't use a front-end with that Myth Machine do you?  You may not 
>>get enough bandwidth.
>>
>>Many of the Linksys products and products that use the prism chipset 
>>seem to be supported.
>>
>>-Nate
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Theron Conrey [mailto:theron@conrey.org]
>>Sent: Tuesday, April 26, 2005 11:11 AM
>>To: cialug@cialug.org
>>Subject: [Cialug] PCI Wireless Card
>>
>>
>>
>>OK so in moving and cleaning up my entertainment area I've decided to
>>dump the cat5 strung over to my classy looking mythtv box and slap in a 
>>wireless card.  I had a usb wireless that I used for a while but it was 
>>flaky at best.  So the question posed: what PCI wireless cards are folks 
>>running currently for linux, and what drivers are they using?  Good site 
>>/ links appriciated.