Finding wireless cards

As a general rule Broadcom is not always your best choice of network card if you are using Linux. One of the problems is that Broadcom may send out two network cards with the same name and model, but with different chip. They seem to think that as long as the same driver works for both card under Windows, users don't care. That's why I say: if you are using Linux, try to stay away from Broadcom, if you have no choice, you can try NDIS-wrapper. I still remember the year Dell started using Broadcom B44 cards, and how it took two years before it was compatible. This was an Ethernet nic, not wifi... I had serious problems and had to buy 150 3Com nics...

Check out:

http://www.linux-drivers.org/

A good resource for all Linux hardware compatibility issues. Especially, check out the item "Linux Wireless LAN Support", which lists chipsets, etc for many products. The link resolves to:

http://linux-wless.passys.nl/

The complete list, available from the bottom of the page, lists compatibility of hundreds of devices with a simple red/green/yellow/grey scheme pointing to necessary drivers.

Also, the two following topics on the above-referenced linux-wless page have information that might be helpful:

• "802.11g Client Adapters"

• "Hardware supported by MadWifi"

Good Luck.

I highly recommend Atheros with the 512 or 512A chipset. If you need to get into that mode for aircrack-ng, their site also has list of compatible cards. Another good spot to look is the UbuntuHCL website (assuming you're running Ubuntu that is).