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.

• Computers