Feisty + Wireless PC Card

[Derek Broughton]

On Sunday 15 July 2007 16:56:58 K Theodor wrote:
> -
> Thanks very much for the reply.

Please don't respond to me personally.  Generally I don't read such emails. 
Mailing lists benefit everybody, and discussion should stay on the list,
please.
>
> Clearly your knowledge is head & shoulders above mine, for your good reply
> has still left my ignorance intact.

:-)  Sorry.  I hate to get too verbose for the people who don't need the
little nuts & bolts...
>
> So, please excuse my further questioning:
> >Find out what chipset it uses...
...
> >lspci will give you a good clue. ..
>
> Not familiar with the >lspci< acronym. 

It's not an acronym - it's a program.  Open a terminal, type: lspci

> I can see you're doing your level 
> best to show me, for you go on to say,
>
> >So mine shows, in the last two rows:
>
> 03:03.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 2200BG ...
>
> Quite naively on my part, I was trying to see whether I could find
> something similar to >03:03.0 Network controller: Intel... somewhere on
the
> box or the wireless card itself -- but nothing like this found anywhere.

The initial numbers will, in all likelihood be different, but I would expect
it to say "Network controller" or something _like_ that. I doubt there are
any standards.

> You say it's not surprising that my (wired) modem router was detected by
> Feisty without any configuration by me, because very many wired routers
> have Linux drivers. One then wonders why they don't use Linux drivers for
> the wireless PC cards. That, too, would go along way to making life
easier,
> wouldn't it?

Because we've been using wired ethernet for over 20 years, and for many of
those years the majority of NICs were using one driver.  When wifi came
along, it resulted in a bunch of new drivers and somebody got really smart
and came up with ndiswrapper, which allows us to use part of the Windows
driver for those devices where the manufacturer won't give us enough
information to write our own Linux version.

Pretty well any wifi card should work with ndiswrapper, but some will work
much better with native linux drivers.
-- 
derek