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.