Belkin 802.11g support MIA

Well, I shelled out $170 for two of the new Belkin 802.11g cards from
CompUSA because the Belkin rep there convinced me about compatibility with
Linux. I have been using Linux/Solaris/BSD moderatly for the last few
years so I knew what questions to ask and what I needed to know. It
sounded as if he knew what he was talking about. Well much to my surprise,
the cards I bought will not under RH9. Googling for part number F5D7000
and Linux turns up nothing helpful. I returned to CompUSA to find another
Belkin rep who restated that, the cards I bought work for MacOS X out of
the box because the chipset in the card is used in AirPort Extreme and
Apple has the drivers for AirPort Extreme built into MacOS X. SO my
questions are:

1) Is there a way someone can extract the drivers from MacOS X for the
AirPort Extreme card and recompile them for support under Linux i386?

2) Are there any 802.11g cards supported under Linux at this time or in
the future?

"Mama Mia" <(E-Mail Removed)> writes:

> 1) Is there a way someone can extract the drivers from MacOS X for
> the AirPort Extreme card and recompile them for support under Linux
> i386?

Very unlikely.

> 2) Are there any 802.11g cards supported under Linux at this time or
> in the future?

There are drivers for the Atheros and Intersil (Prism GT) chipsets.
But not for Broadcom, which is what your Belkin adapter has:

<http://www.linux-wlan.org/docs/wlan_adapters.html>

The Intersil driver is currently distributed from a student's web
page at Rutgers:

<http://ruslug.rutgers.edu/~mcgrof/802.11g/>

The Atheros driver is supported by the vendor and distributed from
SourceForge:

<http://www.atheros.com/news/linux.html>
<http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi/>

Browsing the mailing lists, it sounds like neither of these drivers is
very mature. They are certainly not part of any Linux distibution
yet. But development on them is active.

There is no Linux support for the Broadcom chipsets (used by Belkin
and Linksys), and Broadcom seems to prefer it that way. So I suggest
you avoid their products and tell your friends to do likewise.

- Pat

Amazing news!!
Try the new Driverloader from http://www.linuxant.com
It seems to work on all the Broadcom 802.11G, and works perfectly with mine.
Cool stuff!

Zia wrote:
> Amazing news!!
> Try the new Driverloader from http://www.linuxant.com
> It seems to work on all the Broadcom 802.11G, and works perfectly with mine.
> Cool stuff!

How timely. I'm just about to buy 802.11g kit. I'll probably
still buy from vendors that have open-source drivers, but
it's nice to have the option.
- Dan