OT: Belkin wireless products

[Michael Kearey]

Andrew Robinson wrote:
> In today's Sunday newspaper, Office Max is advertising some very good 
> rebate deals on Belkin 802.11g wireless products. (Actually they say 
> 54G. Is there a difference?) I was looking at the wireless router and 
> the wireless notebook card. The PC card would go in a Dell Latittude 
> laptop that mostly runs Windows 2000, but on which I also run Linux 
> (Redhat 9 currently, though I plan to update to Fedora Core 1). I know 
> very little about the relative merits of different vendors' wireless 
> products. So I was hoping to get some opinions from folks on this list.
> 
> Is the Belkin router and adapter worth having? Will the laptop adapter 
> work with Linux? Any thing else I should know about them?

I have a Belkin PCI card adapter , according to the box '54g' and 
802.11b compatible. It's a ' Network controller: Broadcom Corporation 
BCM94306 802.11g (rev 02)' for which there are no working drivers in 
Linux. HOWEVER....

I managed to get it to work using the gadget available at 
www.linuxant.com, if you feel like paying a few dollars ($19 US).

There is also a project that does the ndiswrapper. 
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ that may get it working after a 
bit of a fiddle. I haven't tried yet, and didn't know about it until 
after I'd got the driver from linuxant :/

The thing I like about Belkin is the 'Life time warranty' if that's 
any help to you . The thing I really dislike is that they don't have 
GPL Linux drivers available..

Cheers,
Michael