A survey of Linux and WiFi

This page was conceived because I was very frustrated with the state of WiFi "11g" support on Linux in the spring and summer of 2004. During the fall and winter of 2003 everything was fine, 802.11g cards were what they seemed and quite a lot of the available cards were supported by one of two drivers.

Then 11g "turbo" or "super" happened, and everything went sour. In the spring of 2004 the same cards that worked in late 2003 were sporting new, totaly incompatible chipsets, and if you were lucky the product name had changed a bit, but not always.

As of 2006 the whole area is a bit more quiet and easy to understand. The working chipsets are all very usable.

Some working WiFi drivers on Linux are:

• MADWIFI "NG" which has very few issues. The NG driver still needs a binary only HAL. This NG driver works well. The HAL was kindly provided by Atheros for use with BSD and Linux. The project has a Hardware Supported page, and Atheros has a database of vendors and card models that uses the cipset.
• Intel is back on the bandwagon, they have open source drivers for their Centrino WiFi chipsets: 2200BG/2915ABG and 2100. Works very well.
• The Taiwan company Ralink (and Minitar) appears to have gotten the idea of GPL and they have GPLed the drivers for their RT2400 (11b only) and RT2500 (11g) chipsets. The GPLed drivers are hosted at Sourceforge. The project to create a unified GPL driver is at rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/. Reported to work very well.
• In desperation of the Linux support for WiFi cards there are two projects that will enable you to use your Linux-hostile hardware: Ndiswrapper and DriverLoader. Both of these are reported to work fine. I would not recommended cards supported by these unless you're unable to exchange your hardware with something more Linux friendly.
• Some USB WiFi devices are supported by the Amtelwlandriver. I have not looked at USB devices at all. They have an extensive hardware list. The project appears to be abandoned before new year in 2004.
• Some other Intersil USB "Prism54 SoftMAC" devices are supported by the new Prism54 project.

On the non-working side there are a couple of posiblities:

• Some turbo cards uses the acx111 chipset from Texas Instruments. This is supported by the acx100 driver. It is in alpha/beta status and TI is not forthcomming with documentation (or source code). This driver appears to have many issues, especially with the acx111 chipset.
• Prism54 used to be a good hardware choice. PCI and PC-CARD/PCMCIA cards sold now will not work and the chipset manufacturer is not cooperating. There is work on a completely open driver underway, but this is far from working in april. 2006. Stay away.

The manufacturers of Atheros, RT and Intel chipsets seem Linux friendly, cooperating as they are. Atheros has turbo chips which MADWIFI supports. Go with one of the cards with such hardware.

TI, Intersil and numerous others on the other hand are not cooperating. While the developers of the acx100 driver are to be applauded, TI should not be applauded.

In november 2005 I would choose a Atheros or Intel based card, but I have colleagues that likes C-Net Ralink cards as well. A lot of laptops seem do have Atheros and Centrino chipsets - and these should all be fine, but Centrino is probably more painless (as of April 2006). Please be adviced that both need separate (manual) firmware installation with some Linux distributions (as do most cards because all the firmware is non-free and sometimes copyrighted in unfriendly ways).

Vote with your feet.

So this page is a survey of WiFi cards available to me (in Oslo, Norway), known versions, and Linux support status as far as I could determine. But don't take my word for it, if you see a card you like, check the support status and use Google. WiFi on Linux is a mine field.

Last updated 2006-04-24