New Wireless Kit

About three months ago the hub on my old ADSL router (Linksys model WAG54G) packed up forcing me to route all traffic to my computer upstairs through my ancient and rather unstable laptop via the wireless network. The laptop has a one each of a wired and wireless network adaptor.

This wasn’t ideal so I finally got round to ordering some new hardware and a couple of days ago it arrived. I got a Linksys WRT54GS and a Netgear WG111v2, both capable of 54Mb/s.

I haven’t tried the Linksys yet, but the Netgear wireless dongle works fine on Fedora core 4. I installed Ndiswrapper from livna, installed the driver that came with on the CD with the dongle and it Just Worked (bar fiddling with iwconfig). iwconfig reports a near perfect link quality and transfer rates upto 54Mb/s.

Apparently support for this device with native Linux drivers is being worked on in the prism54 project, but the device seems to work fine with ndiswrapper for now.