# best wireless equipment

## cujo

i'm looking to make the move to wireless soon and i am wondering what kind of equipment to get.  you know, the kind that i wont have to many fits using gentoo with.  i'd really like one of those hybrid 802.11a/802.11b waps and teh pcmcia card to go along with it. but they seem to only be available for various versions of windows and sometimes macs.  

has anyone gotten these to work?  i like netgear stuff, but its primarily windows based.  tell me what works best for you!

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## xpunkrockryanx

i've really enjoyed my orinoco 802.11b wap and orinoco gold pcmcia card. if you want to use your laptop for war driving, i'd definately recommend the orinoco gold card, which supports 128-bit encryption (as opposed to the silver card which only supports 40, although i've heard that you can apply a gold card firmware to the silver to make it do 128, but use at your own risk), because the orinoco cards have linux drivers, will go into promisc mode (as opposed to most others except i think d-link cards), and have an antenna plug right in the card so you dont have to open it up and solder onto it like you would with the d-link cards.

hope that helps....

-ryan

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## rlyacht

I'll second the Orinoco recommendation.  I have a linksys access point, which works fine, however the linksys PCMCIA cards are not nearly as good as the Orinoco.

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## pilla

What about the prices? Aren't the orinoco cards a lot more expensive.

I have some doubts about which protocol is more adopted, 802.11a or b. 

Do you think a dual a/b card is desirable for the future?

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## xpunkrockryanx

i think the orinoco gold card is around a hundred bucks last time i checked a couple months ago. they're not really any or much more expensive than the linksys or other brands.

802.11b is definately way more adopted than 802.11a.

a dual a/b card might be desirable, but i haven't seen any that exist (although i havent looked much), i've only seen a dual a/b wap so far, and it's definately going to run up the price. my suggestion would be to just go with the 802.11b for now, and then in a couple years maybe if a is more adopted or some other technology comes into the market, upgrade at that time.

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## ashkar

i would also recommend the orinoco. it has worked quite well for me. the price difference between it and others should be negligable and the linux support is excellent. i'm too lazy to check at the moment, but i believe that 802.11g is supposed to be a/b compatible. i don't know about availability, but you might want to check on it.

as far as waps, i have an airport which has also worked quite well. i will complain about the lack of a web/telnet interface, and the issue that it has doing pppoe with my isp (bellsouth). you should probably check on the linksys mentioned above as well as smc, who i have heard good things about.

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## xpunkrockryanx

as far as 802.11b wap's go, i really like my orinoco rg-1100. it came with wep enabled by default, has a nifty configuration/monitor tool, and supports security things like mac filters (strangely a lot of the wap's i looked at by linksys and the like didnt have mac filtering) and it will do dhcp serving, nat, etc if you wanted it to. not saying that this is the best wap, just that i like it.

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## jay

Continuing this thread here

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## manny15

I'm using the Linksys WUSB11, a 802.11b USB adapter. At first it was quite unstable and only worked sparingly, but it seems like ever since I enabled debug messages on both kernel usb support AND the atmeldriver (a separate package with no ebuild yet) it's benn working quite well. Once in a while I lose my connection but I noticed that re-plugging the adpater, reloading the driver, and /etc/init.d/net.eth0 start does the job!  :Cool: 

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