Some of you know that I have been having problems getting my laptop on WiFi. The on-board card is proprietary and left me banging my head against the wall trying to make it work. A couple of weeks ago I decided enough was enough. I searched Newegg for a PCMCIA WiFi card that would work with Linux. I found one but it seemed a little... cheap. Of course it was out of stock but they offered to send me an email when it was available.

Last week I got the email. I went online and purchased the card thinking that I'd only be out $20 if it didn't work and I could get most of that back by returning it. I did the three-day shipping from UPS and ended up waiting four days for it because the shipment was rescheduled after they realized it wasn't in the same state as I was on the day it was supposed to be delivered. I figured that was a slight problem and apparently so did they.

So yesterday I just happened to walk out on my front stoop and noticed that a box had been carelessly tossed up there. Handy. In the box was a shiny new WiFi card. The instructions in the box were for setting it up to work with Windoze (15 pages worth) and a driver CD. I was thinking that with no mention of Linux in the paperwork that I was in for some trouble. My Fedora laptop was already booted up so I pushed the card into the PCMCIA slot on the side and waited for something to happen.

I'm not sure what I thought was going to happen, maybe a pop-up saying that I had done something or... well, anything. Well, nothing happened. I clicked on the Network Manager icon at the top of the screen and was pleasantly suprised to see my wireless network displayed in the list! How cool! That would be a zero-configuration install right there. After transferring the WPA2 key to my laptop and putting the MAC address in the WAP I was up and running. VERY COOL!

I'd say to anyone to get one of these cards but I noticed earlier that they were sold out again. So go get in line if you want one.