5.4. My Wireless Card Works on Another Operating System, but Not Linux

Personally, I'm rather annoyed with the current state of wireless connections from Linux. With precious few exceptions, you can't just plug and play an 802.11g card on a Linux laptop computer. As we move toward Intel's "World Without Wires," Linux is going to have to handle 802.11a/b/g and even "WiMAX" (802.16) network cards seamlessly. But for the immediate future, Linux geeks will often have to download and compile experimental drivers. If you take this approach, you'll have to recompile the kernel with modules every time you upgrade the kernel.

Fortunately, the need for Linux wireless card drivers has the attention of the hacker community. As of this writing, 4 of the top 10 Linux kernel projects listed on SourceForge are focused on specific wireless chipsets. I've managed to download and install "alpha" drivers on my laptop computer fairly easily. But it did require that I recompile my kernel. If this is too time-consuming, proprietary help is available from Linuxant (which happens to taint your kernel). A number of the hacking approaches are based on using an NDIS wrapper around an existing Windows XP driver. You'll need to configure your kernel source code with loadable modules. I cover recompiling the kernel in "Recompiling the Kernel" in Chapter 7.