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Wifi cards/bluetooth whcih works out of the box?

Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2011 12:18 am
by duke1
which Wifi cards/blue-tooth cards works out of the box? for Debian? or that have open source drivers?

I noticed they have tiny little blue tooth usb things at wal mart, Wonder if they will work?

How fast is bluetooth?

Re: Wifi cards/bluetooth whcih works out of the box?

Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2011 1:08 am
by lukee
In general, very good support in Linux has WiFi cards with the following chips:

- Atheros
- Intel

Supported, but only with binary, non-open source driver:

- Broadcom


About Bluetooth - I think almost every device should work out of the box as the bluetooth specification is commonly unified.

Re: Wifi cards/bluetooth whcih works out of the box?

Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2011 5:26 am
by Volker
Intel has by far the best driver support. They are actively developing linux wifi drivers. Will work out of the box as long as your hardware is older than the linux distribution you are using.

Broadcom is the worst, avoid at all cost.

Atheros only relatively recently started to release open-source drivers for their hardware. I don't know about the quality of the driver. They were recently bought by Qualcomm. Although we can hope for the best, Qualcomm isn't known for their linux friendliness. E.g. their total lack of end-user Linux support for the Gobi UMTS cards...

Re: Wifi cards/bluetooth whcih works out of the box?

Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2011 2:54 pm
by ozzymud
For mini-pci wifi: http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_host ... f=mini-PCI

The complete list is at: http://linux-wless.passys.nl/

Along with intel, Ralink based cards are nice, the manufacturer works hard to provide Linux drivers (source even :)).

And on bluetooth, I can concur with what was said, I have yet to find a bluetooth adaptor that doesn't work in Linux. Although there are some that people have issues with on different flavors... http://en.opensuse.org/HCL:Bluetooth. The best ones seem to be those $2 micro ones you can get from Hong Kong :P