[clue-tech] going wireless

[Peter Kuykendall]

I'm running Ubuntu on a year-old Dell laptop.  It's built-in Broadcom 
wireless adapter worked after following some simple instructions from the 
web.  In that case it required running a program which performs "firmware 
cutting", meaning it extracts the proprietary Broadcom firmware from the 
device and uses it.  It's a workaround to having to ship Broadcom's 
proprietary code with the distribution.

For general use on other PCs I have an Airlink 101 cardbus 802.11b adapter. 
Linux supports it natively, i.e. without NDIS wrapper and without any 
proprietary code.  The catch is that I bought the thing at Fry's, which is a 
chain in California but not in Colorado.  Presumably it's available via mail 
order.  It's cheap too; I spent $25 on it as I recall, about a year ago.

It always comes up fine, no matter which live distro CD I'm using on every 
random laptop that I've tried it on.

- Pete

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Roy J. Tellason" <rtellason at verizon.net>
To: "CLUE tech" <clue-tech at cluedenver.org>
Sent: Monday, December 08, 2008 11:21 AM
Subject: [clue-tech] going wireless


>I recently acquired this Sony laptop that isn't "new" enough to come with 
>any
> sort of wireless built into it.  I've shrunk the installed XP down to 3G 
> or
> so and have been running Slackware on the rest of it for a while now.
>
> I'm looking to get some idea of what I need to do to get wireless going 
> with
> this machine.  There's some work that I'm looking at that seems to require
> it.  I don't even know if I want a pcmcia card or something that'd plug 
> into
> a USB connector,  or if I have an open slot inside somewhere.
>
> A bit of reading on the subject tells me that there are issues with what
> appears to be the same adapter using different chipsets from time to time.
> Other than that,  I've not really much of a clue as to what I need to do
> here.
>
> Recommendations for both hardware and software would be appreciated.
>
>
> -- 
> Member of the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting -- and
> ablest -- form of life in this section of space,  a critter that can
> be killed but can't be tamed.  --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters"
> -
> Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by 
> lies. --James
> M Dakin
> _______________________________________________
> clue-tech mailing list
> clue-tech at cluedenver.org
> http://www.cluedenver.org/mailman/listinfo/clue-tech
>