[Tfug] Recommendations for hassle free desktop wireless card

[Zack Breckenridge]

In case by "hassle free" you mean just go to a local retail store, buy a
wireless card and have it work, I just got a Netgear N150 USB card, and it
works great with zero configuration. However, I'm running fedora 18, with a
3.8.x kernel.
On Apr 9, 2013 10:11 PM, "Zack Williams" <zdwzdw at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>>
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>
>
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