On Mon, 2007-06-18 at 16:38 +0100, Rob Grant wrote:
i) suggestions for a usb wireless card that should plug and play with Linux, Macs and Windows. Physical robustness probably a help too.
ii) or is this whole idea a bad one?
It is going to be a difficult search I am afraid, naturally you want to go the USB route rather than PCMCIA because not all new laptops have PCMCIA.
Of those that work a lot require a firmware image download (which is going to be difficult to do before you get the link up) and/or only work for specific hardware revisions (and it's not easy to buy a specific hardware revision of a card). For the former you could of course stick the firmware with installation instructions on a CD or USB keydrive
Then the range of wireless USB dongles that will play nicely with OSX without lots of fiddling (you mention wanting it to be Mac compatible too) is pretty limited, I am not even sure OSX will let you use a third party card if there is built in wireless hardware available.
Even Windows is a bit of a problem if the machine already has Wireless (and a fair percentage of recent laptops will) as you can get unexpected behaviour by adding an additional card. Even more so if there is no way to make the existing wireless card disappear without disabling the driver in the device manager. And things only get worse if the existing card has a third party connection management bundle of nastiness on the taskbar.
I've tried to help Coffee shops and pubs etc with this sort of set up before and to be honest it is more trouble than it is worth.
Perhaps you should ask the UEA should consider having a area on their MAC registration page where a temporary visitor pass can be granted, perhaps this would have restricted access compared to a fully registered MAC. It just strikes me that offering pe-registered cards for loan effectively weakens the presumed reasoning for having the MAC lockdowns in the first place.
Sorry I usually try to be more positive about the advice I give :-)