Since I moved my desk in another room far from the ethernet plugs, I needed a wireless access to the laboratory network (and internet). I tested two PCMCIA card on a laptop with Fedora Core 4.
The first card I found at home was an Acer card without too much information on it (it was sold with my wife’s laptop). When inserted, a lspci tells me that it’s a Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8180L 802.11b MAC (rev 20). But the Fedora Hardware Browser doesn’t recognize it. There is an open project to support this card but it’s still experimental ( they are saying it on their own webpage). My lazy nature asked my hand to eject the card. This card is recognized but not working ‘out-of-the-box’.
The second card I tested was a SMC2632W. The strange thing is that a lspci doesn’t give me any information. But the Fedora Hardware Browser recognised the card as a Intersil PRISM2 11Mbps Wireless Adapter.
The fact that the card is working is further confirmed by iwconfig (it finds wifi0 and wlan0) and cat /proc/net/wireless. But … I don’t have any wireless access point at home (and none of my neighbours seem to have one since I can’t establish a link to any access point). I’ll have to wait till Monday to test and configure it in the lab.