Wireless, not that hard

In the past I've had numerous issues with wireless devices and Linux. Either the chipset was not supported, flaky encryption support, weak connections, dropped connections. It was so bad that I completely banned wireless from our home for a number of years. I was under the (wrong) assumption that this is one aspect of Linux that just did not work.

Not too long ago I was given a couple of old Laptops as payment for some work I had done. These varied in speed from 1.7ghz with 1gig ram, to a PIII 600 with 384 ram. Wireless options included an Ornico wireless B card, Broadcom BCM 4309, and a Linksys PCMCIA wireless G adapter. I already had an rt73usb wireless stick that had worked pretty well on unencrypted networks in the past.

Previously I've gone as far as attempting to use one of the User Friendly Distros and acclaimed Network Manager. Each which failed just the same as Slackware's wireless tools and/or Wicd. Looks as though things have changed today - for the most part.

The good - My rt73usb stick now works out of the box, nothing special to do at all. Plug it in, and everything is auto loaded. Fire up Wicd, and WPA/WPA2 worked without a hitch. Good speed, no drops over a decent period of time. The same with the Ornico wireless B, though this chipset did require me to put the agrere firmware in /lib/firmware. The Ornico only supported WPA encryption. Not really bothered by that. If a person can hack WPA, WPA2 is not that much more difficult.

The not so bad - The Linksys PCMCIA (InProComm) adapter is not supported by Linux. Ndiswrapper to the rescue. This is simple to do. Install ndiswrapper, ndiswrapper -i $driver.inf, modprobe ndiswrapper. Done. Just a couple of extra steps, but everything worked, and works well.

The bad - The BCM 4309 complained about needing a firmware, and to use the fw-cutter tools. So I did. Chipset was found and loaded, Wicd, nor any of the wireless tools could find any wireless networks. Ndiswrapper to the rescue again? Well, sort of. Using ndiswrapper I was able to find and connect to our network, but this still had issues. Either poor connection strength - all other wireless devices report between 80-99% strength the BCM 4309 reports between 50-75%. Connection drops, and OH the battery drain. Kernel 2.6.32.4 has better support for the 4309 (did not need fw-cutter), but the result was the same.

So, currently wireless in Linux works, and actually works to the point I'd call flawless. As long as you use a quality, well supported chipset. After searching for solutions for my Broadcom wireless, it seems as though these chipsets produce problems for most people. Though there appears one or two versions that work marginally well. Personally I'll avoid or replace anything Broadcom for now.