Wireless Chipsets - Waikato Linux Users Group

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Although there are many different wireless cards made by many different vendors available for purchase today, there are only a small number of companies that make wireless chipsets. For example almost all 802.11b cards in existence today have either an Intersil Prism or Agere Hermes chipset in them. Chipsets are important because usually wireless drivers work with Chipsets rather than individual cards. Finding out whether your chipset is supported in Linux is the first step in getting your wireless card working.

Lists of Card Chipsets

You may be able to find out what chipset your card contains by looking at one of the following lists.

http://www.linux-wlan.org/docs/wlan_adapters.html.gz

802.11b Chipsets

PrismWirelessChipset by Intersil
HermesWirelessChipset by Agere

802.11g Chipsets (Often these support both b and g)

PrismGTWirelessChipset by Intersil
Atheros chipset

802.11a Chipsets (Often these support a, b and g)

Please fill in here

Which Chipset should I use?

An excellent question, it depends on what you want to do.

The best cards for general 802.11b use are the Proxim Gold cards which contain a HermesWirelessChipset, these are well supported by Linux via a number of drivers. They will work in both AdHoc and Managed modes but they cannot do HostAP. If you want a card that can do HostAP (act as an AccessPoint), then you need to buy a card with a PrismWirelessChipset.

DickSmith's sell a CardBus 802.11g wireless card (product number XH8225) that uses an Atheros chipset (AR5212). These can be made to work under linux, but unfortunately it is fiddly (see below) -- it doesn't come with the required linux drivers, and their website has a snapshot of the driver from CVS but it is too old to compile against kernel 2.6.9. Unless you are comfortable compiling a kernel from source and grabbing the module source via CVS, maybe you shouldn't consider buying one of these cards.

Alternatively, you could run Ubuntu, and install linux-restricted-modules, and bingo, instant support. The MadWIFI project provides distro agnostic support, also. -- GreigMcGill

Linux Kernel Support

The following is from LinuxKernel 2.6.9, but should be similar for similarly-versioned kernels.

Check you have support (modules or built-in) for the following:

CONFIG_NET_RADIO (Device Drivers -> Networking Support -> Wireless LAN)

If you have a Hermes chipset-based card or a Prism chipset-based card, then you should enable the relevant option under the same section, carefully choosing the appropriate ISA/PCI or PCMCIA/CardBus support for your card.
If you are using an 'Atheros' chipset-based card, you will need to download and compile an external module (not part of the vanilla linux kernel) from http://madwifi.sourceforge.net. But you should still have a kernel with CONFIG_NET_RADIO support compiled in. When this module is loaded, ifconfig -a should show a device called "ath0". Note that this driver also has a binary-only component which will taint your kernel.

Once you have the correct hardware support in your running kernel (dmesg(8) should tell you if the card was detected), go and follow the WirelessSetupNotes to get your wireless machine properly configured and on your network.

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Version 8, saved on Friday, January 21, 2005 2:24:11 pm by "LiYan"

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