On Fri, 2 Apr 2010 17:07:35 +0100 Paul Grenyer paul.grenyer@gmail.com allegedly wrote:
Hi All
I'm after some wireless card advice. I have the latest Ubuntu installed on my wife's old:
HP Pavilion Pentium 4
and I'm using it as a build box. I need to go wireless. The machine has a couple of PCI slots free. What would people recommend in terms of a wireless card? How would I then go about setting it up?
I also have an old USB Belkin F5D6050 wireless adapter. I think it's only 16 bit. Could I use that? I have no idea where to start to set it up....
Do you /really/ need to go wireless on that box? That belkin card is 802.11b standard. Depending on the other wireless devices on your network, this could impact on the network's performance as the AP negotiates down to the lowest common denominator device (i.e. the belkin at 11 Mbit/s - in practice likely to be no more than 5 Mbit/s). A newer PCI card such as the F5D7000 or Linksys WMP54G will give you 802.11g (54 Mbit/s) for around 20 quid. But you could also opt for one of the ethernet over powerline options such as Devolo, Solwise or Netgear produce (around 40-50 quid for two). I use the dLan kit on a couple of machines and the throughput (and reliability) is much better than wireless - but my house has thick walls.
I wouldn't worry too much about the setup. If you are using a recent 'buntu the drivers for most popular wireless cards should already be available - and of course if you opt for the "homeplug" type approach, then you don't need to worry about drivers at all.
Mick
---------------------------------------------------------------------
The text file for RFC 854 contains exactly 854 lines. Do you think there is any cosmic significance in this?
Douglas E Comer - Internetworking with TCP/IP Volume 1
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc854.txt ---------------------------------------------------------------------