What PCI wireless card best for fedora core 7?

[whatsanike]

Preamble: Just installed fedora 7 on old sony viaio and this is the first linux distro I have ever found useful, as no time for steep learning curve though patient enough.

What PCI wireless card should or could I buy that might be detected, if any?
Or will I have to do much hacking and tinkering? If so, so be it!

[oz]

Hello and welcome!

I'm unable to recommend any specific card because I don't run any wireless connections at all but one thing to keep in mind is that Fedora 7 is three years old now, so some newer hardware might not work well with it unless you either install drivers for any device that you want to add, or you upgrade your kernel to a newer release that includes any drivers you need. Generally speaking, the later the distribution release, the better the hardware support will be, although there are probably some instances of it not working out that way.

Hopefully some wireless users will be along soon with some hardware recommendations for you.

Best of luck with it, and I hope you'll have lots of fun with Linux!

[D-cat]

What matters more than brand or model is chipset. Different revisions of the same model can have different chipsets. Most work fine in Linux, some don't. Try to find out what chipset a card has before buying so you can research.

Even out of the ones that don't work with native Linux drivers you can often use the XP drivers for via ndiswrapper, though sucess and functionality is variable.

Check out the various Linux Hardware Compatibility databases to see if a card you're thinking of buying has been sucessfully configured under Linux prior to the purchase.

[whatsanike]

The raisin I didn't use Fedora 9 is I bought a mailorder Fedora 9 disk and it would not install for some reason. The Fedora 7 from the Dummies book worked like a charm. There are always issues like this in Linux, but now I am determined to use it. The other major OS gets worse and worse. I have 3 new PC's running stuff from B.G.'s company, and on one of them the update utility of the OS that starts with letter "V" crashed and would not boot up until I used bit-torrent to get a 3rd-party startup CD and figured how to use it to roll back the system about a month to the oldest existing restore point. Now updates still won't work and various fixes from the "Company" are now being tried. Even when the updates work it wastes my time when I want to reboot and use the computer, but this is also true for other popular programs which are always annoying me to install updates. Then those program updates try to sell me stuff like movies and media, or else cause new problems. Well, I digress, but I suppose I will now try a PCI wireless card in the Fedora 7 machine, having bookmarked the internet help pages that tell how to identify the chipset and what to do then. I want to give that machine to my wife so she can communicate in her native language via email with other natives from her native country who also speak her native language. Linux is very good about languages.