[Tfug] Recommendations for hassle free desktop wireless card

[Claude Rubinson]

On Tue, Apr 09, 2013 at 05:55:17PM -0600, ikemann wrote:
> I have never had much luck with Debian + WiFi in such a scenario,
> and always found it better to use eth fir the install and configure
> WiFi card later...

This is what you want to do.  The problem is that almost all wireless
cards require non-free firmware, which Debian provides either in the
firmware-linux-nonfree package or via a separate firmware-* package.
All of these are in the nonfree repo, so Debian's installer won't
bring them in automatically.

This is less of a headache than you might think.  There's only
something like 20 firmware-* packages in Debian, and Debian's
organized them to make it easy to figure out which one you need.  So
the main issue is just making sure to buy a supported card.  What
you'll specifically be looking for is the chipset.  The names of cards
are recycled, changed, etc.  So a card's name in meaningless.  It's
the chipset that matters.

Intel's wireless cards are rock solid with great support for Linux
(apart from the nonfree firmware blob issue).  But I don't think that
they make desktop cards.

If you want to find a wireless card that doesn't rely upon a nonfree
firmware blob, I seem to recall that the FSF maintains a list.

Claude