[clue-tech] I want to know how to probe for wireless hardware

[Bruce Ediger]

On Wed, 12 Jan 2011, Jim Ockers wrote:

> lspci (maybe with -vvv options) will show you what hardware is on a PCI
> bus. If you have other buses (USB?) that the wireless hardware is on
> then you might have to do some other detective work.

lspci and lsusb are what I was going to suggest, too.  "lspcmcia"
might help you with really ancient pluggable wireless cards.

> As for drivers and tools to use them, that might be a manual process
> unless your distribution is designed for it. Can you try Ubuntu?

I second this one.  The only things I've had work out of the box on
Slackware are Atheros-chipset cards, and an ancient Cisco Aironet 350.

Some of the other chipsets (Ralink RT2600, Broadcom B43) seem to require
downloading a windows driver, and then cutting the firmware of some random
Windows file.  It's pretty weird.

The Arch linux wikis seem to have a lot of good info about this sort of thing.