Best cardbus card for WPA?

Steven Ihde x-hostap at hamachi.dyndns.org
Sat Oct 2 19:09:31 EDT 2004


On Sat, 02 Oct 2004 09:15:19 +0200, Wilfried Klaebe wrote:
> Am Fri, Oct 01, 2004 at 07:54:14PM -0700 schrieb x-hostap at hamachi.dyndns.org:
> [...]
> > My goal is not to run an access point; I just want my laptop to be
> > able to use WPA over 802.11b or 802.11g.  But I don't want to load a
> > binary Windows driver via ndiswrapper or linuxant, I want to use an
> > open source driver.  So, it seems to me that the best way to do this
> > is to use a card supported by the HostAP driver and to use
> > wpa_supplicant.  If there's another way to go about it, I'd be glad to
> > hear about that too.
> 
> ORiNOCO a/b/g cards or other Atheros based cards can be driven with 
> madwifi (http://madwifi.sourceforge.net/). madwifi is open source,
> except the HAL, which cannot be open source because of a NDA.
> 
> It works very fine here with WPA on linux.

Well, thanks for the tip.  I wound up with a D-Link DWL-G650, rev B4,
which has an Atheros chipset.  This seems to work great -- smooth
install thanks to the madwifi Debian packages/scripts from here:

http://www.marlow.dk/site.php/tech/madwifi

and wpa_supplicant 0.2.4 from Debian unstable authenticated me on the
first try (I'm using WPA-PSK -- haven't tried EAP).

The D-Link DWL-G650 says on the box that it only supports 802.11b/g,
not 802.11a (don't know if that's really true or not), and thus was
about $60, whereas all the A/B/G cards I saw were about $100 -- but
that's fine with me since I don't use any 802.11a networks.  And at
the moment D-Link seems to be offering a $20 rebate, making it only
$40.

Thanks, and thanks to the authors and maintainers of all this great
software,

Steve




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