Running without Wires: Look into Apache and iPlanet Fargo ND

Posted by : Eric Foster-Johnson Linuxhed: Running without wiresdek: look into Apache and iPlanet.

With the 802.11b standard, reasonably fast wireless networking support is now available from many vendors.

With 802.11b, wireless networking supports 11 Mbps, or slightly more than the speed of the old wired 10 Base-T Ethernet. Most wired Ethernet runs at more than 100 Mbps. Even so, with most users running connections to the Internet at less than 1 Mbps, wireless support for 11 Mbps is not all that bad.

Wireless networking cards are easy to come by. All the major network card manufacturers, including D-Link, Linksys, and SMC, all sell wireless 802.11b cards.

Virtually all these vendors provide Windows drivers for their cards. Many also support Linux drivers. Thus far, the Linux situation has been difficult. Most wireless networking cards are PC Cards designed for notebooks. In a really strange twist, the PCI cards for desktop computers are often PC Cards stuck into some sort of adapter or bridge card. In fact, a number of card vendors require you to purchase a PC Card as well as a separate PCI holder to support a desktop computer. You then place the PC Card into the PCI holder.

All of this mess makes Linux support more difficult, especially for Linux on desktop systems. That's because you have to install Linux PC Card services along with the network card support. For most users, that's two strange installations, along with the potential for having to build y...

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