Ubuntu
gnome-nettool package

Best-supported PCI wireless chipsets (in year 2011)?

Asked by floid

After headaches with a RTL8185-based card ( https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/368679 ), I'm getting a headache trying to research which wireless chipsets are presently well-supported and offer reasonably "modern" features (802.11n, or at least MIMO, etc).

Does anyone have a short list of preferred PCI hardware for pre-PCI-E laptops etc. *at this point in time?*

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

Broadcom 43xx work well, as do mid league atheros chips. Intel have good support for Linux too.

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Sam_ (and-sam) said : 		#2

http://www.cyberciti.biz/tips/linux-laptop.html
http://kmuto.jp/debian/hcl/index.rhtmlx

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floid (jkanowitz) said : 		#3

Thanks for the tips so far.

I guess the list of vendors _succeeding_ at playing nice right now is Atheros and Intel so far.
[And credit to RealTek for trying to play nice, but unfortunately it's not actually working just now.]

http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ , home to "A Linux driver for the Broadcom bcm43xx wireless chips" reports "Broadcom never released details about these chips. So this driver is based upon reverse engineered specifications." Unless *that* is out of date now (I should dip into kernel.org to check, I know)...

Obviously the *appearance* of kernel support and actual *working* support is different so the HCL does not look necessarily helpful. (The Ubuntu Wiki's documentation has something of the same problem, divided up by the many dozen PCI vendor IDs for finished cards rather than a shorter list of actual chipsets. Or I've missed that page.)

@actionparsnip: Where does your idea of "mid-league" ath start?
This is the trouble with catching up after last looking before MIMO 802.11g cards had even hit the market.

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floid (jkanowitz) said : 		#4

Also, why did this get reassigned to gnome-nettool when it's about the state of kernel drivers? :)

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