PCMCIA NICS and Wireless

[Bill Campbell]

On Sat, Sep 28, 2002 at 12:34:12PM -0700, Net Llama! wrote:
>If you're determined to use only Caldera's kernel & pcmcia packages, 
>then you might be out of luck.  From the reports that i've seen all over 
>usenet, Caldera's pcmcia-cs package shipped completely broken.

I've never had any significant problems with them since OpenLinux 1.1 or so
other than the occassional new revision of a card that would require that I
manually edit the /etc/pcmcia/config file to get it recognized (I did this
first doing NFS installs of COL 1.1 on a Toshiba laptop and new 3COM card).

When I look at the syslog output, the Netgear FA511 doesn't seem to report
an identity string so there's nothing to match.

>Looks like you're using the latest pcmcia-cs, but the kernel might be 
>questionable.  Are you looking to get a working pcmcia NIC, or a 
>wireless card or both?  I've had pretty good success with Linksys pcmcia 
>NICs, and Cisco wireless cards.  But, this is under RH-7.2/3 not Caldera.

I'm looking for both wireless and LAN cards.  It would be nice if the LAN
cards don't use dongles since they're always getting broken.  I really
don't want to use cards that hog both slots, although that's not absolutely
critical for most of our customer applications where we're using the
laptops primarily as data entry terminals and servers for our auction
accounting software.

My experience with LinkSys cards has been mixed.  Most of their PCMCIA
cards have worked pretty well, but the PCI cards have been problematic
(recently we had severe problems with several different Tulip PCI cards
that went away when we switched to a 3C905 card and drivers).  On the other
hand, we're in the LinkSys reseller program so I'll try getting some of
their current cards here to test.

I would like to stick with commodity cards that are readily available in
the retail stores so that they can be replaced easily in a pinch.

Bill
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