Wifi in linux? Can it really be THAT easy?
As most of you linux users probably know, implementing wifi capabilities on your desktop (and even laptop) seems to be a thing of the “future”. I had recently purchased a Dell Vostro 400, and the first thing I did was wipe my hard-drive from the bloated, poorly-written, slow, and annoying Windows Vista Home and installed Fedora 8. Is it just me, or does it take a lot of patience and cursing to get anything actually working correctly in linux?
I would like to start out by saying that this desktop was a steal when it was on sale about two months ago for under $1000, including a 24″ LCD monitor. After eBaying the monitor (since I already had a nice one) and selling off my old desktop, it came out to only about $300! I recently added 8GB of RAM (after installing a crucial BIOS update), so my total became a paltry $450 to turn this machine into a beast.
Installing Fedora 8 on any system has been relatively straight-forward, and their base install has been quite good by including many of the important libraries necessary to build other software from source. However, on the Vostro it was non-trivial. After a lot of googling and yelling at the computer, I was able to get Fedora 8 installed using a kernel option irqpoll during bootup, since the SATA drivers I needed didn’t come with the install DVD.
After getting most everything up and running, I had to deal with the 50 foot ethernet cable running from my bedroom to my study/office. I decided to use my old wireless card and figure out if it’ll work with linux. To make a much longer story short, the answer was an emphatic NO (after working on it for about 2.5 days). During my research, I came across madwifi which is a group devoting their time and efforts to build drivers for wifi cards that include an Atheros chipset.
Unfortunately, their compatibility list leaves much to be desired, since it hasn’t been updated often and many of the cards are discontinued or impossible to find. After wasting even more of my time, I settled on a handful of cards that are available online, but are not carried in any local store. Finally, I happened to come across the D-Link WDA-2320 PCI wireless adapter, shown below.
I read that this card apparently works very easily with most newer and older linux distributions and kernels. I also happened to have found it in stock at my local Officemax (the only local retailer that actually had them). After $50 and a simple one-click install, I was on my way to wireless freedom!
Needless to say, I am very happy with the price, performance, and installation ease that this desktop wifi card has provided, and I recommend it to anyone who uses linux and hates running CAT 5 around their home or office.