No G for Linux

[Jonathan Hutchins]

With the prices of 802.11g cards coming in at about the same as the 11a cards,  
and within $30 of the 11b's, I thought I'd take the plunge.  A quick  
comparison-shop at Best Buy and CompUSA got me a pair of Linksys units at the 
latter, a PCI card w/ external antenna for $79.99 and a PCMCIA for $69.99.  
  
The first stumbling block was the PCI card.  My firewall system wouldn't boot  
with the card installed.  Hmm, niether, for that matter, would a spare lab  
system.  Back to CompUSA. 
 
New card boots fine, although it doesn't fit the Compaq backplane very well. 
 
So hackety hack, up2date wireless-tools, google google google and guess what? 
 
The Linksys cards run a Broadcom chipset, for which there is no Linux driver.  
For that matter, the only other chipset I found mentioned is the Intel 
Centrino chipset, and according to the buzz niether manufacturer has released 
specs for driver development yet. 
 
According to the people who have written other wireless drivers, the problem 
is that the driver has the ability to set arbitrary frequencies outside the 
allowable range, and the manufacturers are afraid that if we allow Linux 
people to hack them, they'll start snooping government transmissions or 
interfering with something. 
 
To top it all off, for some reason the PCMCIA card won't install on my NT4 
laptop, which was going to be the test portable, so I guess it's back to 
CompUSA tomorrow and back to the drawing board for me. 
 
I it'll be 11a or b.  Suggestions for cards and sources?  I would love to have 
an external antenna (native, not Duane's frankentenna) for the PCMCIA. 
 
P.S.:  I presume kcwireless is 11b? 

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