[conspire] Re: 802.11 blues update

[Peter Knaggs]

On 10/28/05, Daniel Gimpelevich <daniel at gimpelevich.san-francisco.ca.us> wrote:
> Orinoco cards are 802.11b, not 802.11g, but if that's OK with you, you
> can't go wrong with one. However, you should note that Calvin had a lot
> of trouble with one individual Orinoco card, due to very old firmware
> on the card.

Calvin helped me with getting an Orinoco
Silver pcmcia card to work completely with
Linux. I originally got it on eBay, but it
came with the latest firmware 8.72, which
has bugs with monitor mode. So we flashed
the firmware back to 7.28, and now everything
works fine in all the distros I've tried.

Sometimes Silver cards can be upgraded to
Gold cards using the "alchemy" hack, but
back in 2004 we couldn't get the hack to
work on my card, and I haven't tried recently.
http://www.lincomatic.com/wireless/software.html
A gold card would only let you use a few more
channels and longer WEP keys, so it's not
usually worth the extra money compared to
a Silver.

Cheers,
Peter.