[Tfug] Recommendations for hassle free desktop wireless card

[Zack Williams]

Ralink and Realtek tend to be very well supported in most free OS's - an
example from OpenBSD (which is stricter on binary blob firmwares than most)
from a few years ago, about halfway down the page:

http://kerneltrap.org/node/6550

- Zack


On Tue, Apr 9, 2013 at 9:07 PM, Claude Rubinson <cjr at grundrisse.org> wrote:

> 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
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Tucson Free Unix Group - tfug at tfug.org
> Subscription Options:
> http://www.tfug.org/mailman/listinfo/tfug_tfug.org
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tfug.org/pipermail/tfug_tfug.org/attachments/20130409/16b14b0a/attachment-0002.html>