Wanted: Cheap, Linux compatible wireless card
My son is finally learning to read, and it is time to put a computer in his room. Unfortunately, we live in a hundred-year old house, and the idea of threading several feet of cat5 through bedroom and hallway is not appealing. I am putting Edubuntu on it for him. Does anyone have suggestions for a cheap, Linux compatible wireless card? I prefer an A/B/G card that is WPA compatible. I prefer a USB device if possible, but I won't quibble if PCI is cheaper. I really don't want to deal with ndiswrapper. Any suggestions? Matt Copple mcopple@kcopensource.org
On Thursday 28 August 2008 21:12:20 Matthew Copple wrote:
My son is finally learning to read, and it is time to put a computer in his room. Unfortunately, we live in a hundred-year old house, and the idea of threading several feet of cat5 through bedroom and hallway is not appealing. I am putting Edubuntu on it for him.
If the house is old, it may very well be made in a way that interferes with wireless signals. I'd suggest grabbing a cheap USB dongle from WalMart. If it doesn't work well for any reason, you can just return it :)
Well, unless his old house is made of sheet metal or stone I don't see how it'd have anything that'd cause that many problems. If you can use a baby monitor or a wireless home phone you shouldn't have any trouble, though keep in mind that if they're on 2.4GHz you might run into some interference. For example if my baby monitor mic is in between me and my wireless router I'll get bad performance. Lead pipes in walls and some electrical conduits can provide some interference, but usually just moving one endpoint a few feet is all that's needed. Good luck. J. On Thu, Aug 28, 2008 at 9:25 PM, Luke -Jr <luke@dashjr.org> wrote:
On Thursday 28 August 2008 21:12:20 Matthew Copple wrote:
My son is finally learning to read, and it is time to put a computer in his room. Unfortunately, we live in a hundred-year old house, and the idea of threading several feet of cat5 through bedroom and hallway is not appealing. I am putting Edubuntu on it for him.
If the house is old, it may very well be made in a way that interferes with wireless signals. I'd suggest grabbing a cheap USB dongle from WalMart. If it doesn't work well for any reason, you can just return it :)
-- "He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself." -- Thomas Paine
On 8/29/08 5:21 PM, "Jeffrey Watts" <jeffrey.w.watts@gmail.com> wrote:
Well, unless his old house is made of sheet metal or stone I don't see how it'd have anything that'd cause that many problems. If you can use a baby monitor or a wireless home phone you shouldn't have any trouble, though keep in mind that if they're on 2.4GHz you might run into some interference. For example if my baby monitor mic is in between me and my wireless router I'll get bad performance.
Lead pipes in walls and some electrical conduits can provide some interference, but usually just moving one endpoint a few feet is all that's needed.
Good luck. J.
I've been using wireless in the house for some time, and despite a less than ideal placement on the second floor in the back of the house, it covers both home and both porches quite well. However, we've always accessed the network with our laptops, which had built-in wireless. My old desktop sat right next to the switch/wireless access point, so I was able to use cat5 to connect it to the network. Now that I'm moving the machine to a spot which would require several feet of cable strung clumsily over the floor, or hung across the top of the wall, I am forced to figure out how to support it wirelessly. I considered installing the wiring in the walls, but doing so requires destruction of plaster and lathe wall, not to mention defacing a mural my wife painted for my son when we brought him home from China years ago. We already pulled apart one room for a remodel, and despite our best efforts, we were vacuuming plaster out of every rug in the house for months afterward. Thankfully, the house is hardwood flooring throughout, or we might still be pulling plaster out of carpet today, two years later. Armed with these suggestions, hopefully I'll have him up and running this weekend. Thanks! Matt Copple
Matthew, I am writing this post on a Dell P-III laptop running Xubuntu in my basement. I'm connected wireless to my router upstairs. The adapter I'm using is an SMC EZ Connect USB 2.0 adapter plugged into the one and only USB port on the machine. It works great and I didn't have to use ndiswrapper. Pretty much plug-and--play. Xubuntu, for some reason, requires me to "restart" /etc/init.d/networking after bootup to get connected. It doesn't connect automatically on boot but I believe this is an Xubuntu shortcoming rather than a problem with the adapter. Once connected, it's stable. I think I paid about $30.00 for the adapter new in box. My two cents. Hope you find something that works for you. Ty Unes - riverty@gmail.com Matthew Copple wrote:
My son is finally learning to read, and it is time to put a computer in his room. Unfortunately, we live in a hundred-year old house, and the idea of threading several feet of cat5 through bedroom and hallway is not appealing. I am putting Edubuntu on it for him.
Does anyone have suggestions for a cheap, Linux compatible wireless card? I prefer an A/B/G card that is WPA compatible. I prefer a USB device if possible, but I won't quibble if PCI is cheaper. I really don't want to deal with ndiswrapper.
Any suggestions?
Matt Copple mcopple@kcopensource.org
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--- On Thu, 8/28/08, Matthew Copple <mcopple@kcopensource.org> wrote:
My son is finally learning to read, and it is time to put a computer in his room. Unfortunately, we live in a hundred-year old house, and the idea of threading several feet of cat5 through bedroom and hallway is not appealing. I am putting Edubuntu on it for him.
Does anyone have suggestions for a cheap, Linux compatible wireless card? I prefer an A/B/G card that is WPA compatible. I prefer a USB device if possible, but I won't quibble if PCI is cheaper. I really don't want to deal with ndiswrapper.
Any suggestions?
About four months ago I posted about Microcenter selling just such a Linux-compatible wireless PCI card, supporting wireless standards A/B/G/N and also WPA, for only $19.99. This one worked out of the box on Ubuntu 7.10, and didn't stop working when I upgraded the whole system to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS today. Microcenter still had at least a dozen left last week, and the boxes still aren't shrink-wrapped so you can verify the chipset yourself. The Free Software Foundation recommends (among others) the RALink-based network card chipset. It works great on the rt2500 driver. --- On Wed, 4/23/08, Leo Mauler <webgiant@yahoo.com> wrote:
I was browsing through the wireless network cards at Microcenter (93rd & Metcalf) and came across a "generic" (or at least "no brand name") wireless card for $19.99. The chipset is a RA2561T, the "AWI-926T" model name seems to indicate that it is an "Amigo" network card.
It does 802.11g and 802.11n, and when I got it home Ubuntu found it and used the RALink driver with no difficulty getting it to connect to my 802.11g wireless router. Cards using the RALink driver are among those recommended by the Free Software Foundation.
I thought I'd mention this in case anyone is looking for a cheap, Linux-compatible, FSF-recommended chipset wireless PCI card. It is one of the few boxes which isn't shrink-wrapped so you can verify the chipset for yourself (if you like).
I should probably add that I got the card so that I could run a "radio VCR" in a 2nd-floor bedroom. All the other computers are in the basement where there is no good radio reception, so the upstairs computer records radio programs and also sends a streaming signal to a basement computer. Ubuntu has a four-bar "wireless signal strength" icon on the applet bar, and the cheap wireless PCI card mentioned here never goes below three bars as it transmits its signal about 30 feet to the wireless router, through two cheaply-constructed wooden floors. --- On Sat, 8/30/08, Leo Mauler <webgiant@yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Leo Mauler <webgiant@yahoo.com> Subject: Re: Wanted: Cheap, Linux compatible wireless card To: kclug@kclug.org Date: Saturday, August 30, 2008, 4:57 PM --- On Thu, 8/28/08, Matthew Copple <mcopple@kcopensource.org> wrote:
My son is finally learning to read, and it is time to put a computer in his room. Unfortunately, we live in a hundred-year old house, and the idea of threading several feet of cat5 through bedroom and hallway is not appealing. I am putting Edubuntu on it for him.
Does anyone have suggestions for a cheap, Linux compatible wireless card? I prefer an A/B/G card that is WPA compatible. I prefer a USB device if possible, but I won't quibble if PCI is cheaper. I really don't want to deal with ndiswrapper.
Any suggestions?
About four months ago I posted about Microcenter selling just such a Linux-compatible wireless PCI card, supporting wireless standards A/B/G/N and also WPA, for only $19.99. This one worked out of the box on Ubuntu 7.10, and didn't stop working when I upgraded the whole system to Ubuntu 8.04 LTS today. Microcenter still had at least a dozen left last week, and the boxes still aren't shrink-wrapped so you can verify the chipset yourself.
The Free Software Foundation recommends (among others) the RALink-based network card chipset. It works great on the rt2500 driver.
--- On Wed, 4/23/08, Leo Mauler <webgiant@yahoo.com> wrote:
I was browsing through the wireless network cards at Microcenter (93rd & Metcalf) and came across a "generic" (or at least "no brand name") wireless card for $19.99. The chipset is a RA2561T, the "AWI-926T" model name seems to indicate that it is an "Amigo" network card.
It does 802.11g and 802.11n, and when I got it home Ubuntu found it and used the RALink driver with no difficulty getting it to connect to my 802.11g wireless router. Cards using the RALink driver are among those recommended by the Free Software Foundation.
I thought I'd mention this in case anyone is looking for a cheap, Linux-compatible, FSF-recommended chipset wireless PCI card. It is one of the few boxes which isn't shrink-wrapped so you can verify the chipset for yourself (if you like).
participants (5)
-
Jeffrey Watts -
Leo Mauler -
Luke -Jr -
Matthew Copple -
Ty Unes