Don’t Buy Netgear WG511 To Use With Linux
So, I recently bought the netgear wg511 card from newegg. The reviews on newegg are glowing for this card, and how well supported it is in Linux. My package arrived yesterday, and I tried to get it setup with the prism54 driver. Turns out, I received version 2 of the card, which uses the Marvell chipset, and the only way i’m going to get it running is with the ndiswrapper project that lets me use the windows driver, but that just feels dirty. Plus, I’d really like to support a business that uses a chipset supported by linux. So full of hate right now.
Posted in Gadgets, Geek Stuff, Linux
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Madwifi supports many Netgear 802.11g cards. They do support the Netgear WG511T.
Madwifi has a huge list of wireless network cards that the madwifi driver supports,
available at this link http://madwifi.org/wiki/Compatibility .
I am somewhat in the same boat as you are, having problems getting my wpc54g version 1
with the broadcom chipset to work on linux. I wasted so much time with NDIS wrapper and
linuxant to find that my card was not so much of a problem but that the yenta_socket
pcmcia driver for the TI PCI 1410 Cardbus controller has a hardware conflict with the
specific chipset of my card. I figured this out when trying to put the card in my friend’s
laptop to see that his machine running the same exact version of linux and the same kernel
but on a different pcmcia cardbus controller immediately was able to detect the card while
inserting it into the pcmcia slot on my laptop never showed any messages in dmesg,
lspci, or kernel messages indicating any detection of the card. However, my laptop
had no problems with detecting a different card, the wpc11 version 3 with prism chipset.
So after a few weeks of trying different linux distrobutions, different kernels, changing
kernel parameters, and kernel hacking, I found that there was no problem with the card
but the linux driver for an integrated piece of hardware on the motherboard of my laptop
was the problem. There are 3 solutions in that case, buy a new laptop with a motherboard
that has hardware with better linux support or buy a new wireless network card that is
guaranteed to be supported by linux, and is known to work with the current pcmcia driver,
or find a better driver for the pcmcia controller. The last option, in the case of a
toshiba laptop, is just not going to happen, because toshiba does not offer linux support
for the drivers of its laptops. Toshiba’s driver for the pci 1410 cardbus controller is
only offered as an exe file, so it can only be opened and installed on windows.