[Replying to list as I guess this might be of use to others] On Tue, Jun 1, 2010 at 06:44, Cameron Hutchison <c...@xdna.net> wrote: >>Does anyone have any experience of doing this and/or can suggest any >>cards which would be suitable? Draft N support would be nice, but not >>essential. I am in the UK which may or may not make it harder - most >>places don't seem to sell mini PCI-E cards, but maybe that's the same >>worldwide. > > I recently purchased an atheros mini pcie half-card off ebay. Most of > the sellers of these will ship world-wide. Prices are around $US15-20. > Search ebay for "atheros mini pci half". >
For some reason I didn't even think to check eBay. Good idea :-) > If you leave "half" out of the search, it turns up a number of AR5008 > models. I read recently that these are not so well supported, so you may > want to skip them. > > Anyway, I stuck one of these into my laptop today and turned it into an > access point successfully. > > These use the ath9k driver, which is one of the most mature drivers in > the Linux tree, with full open source - no binary blobs needed as far as > I know. Certainly no host-side blobs. > > One downside to the card I got it that is has a single radio for > 802.11n - no 5Ghz band. For an AP, you probably want to make sure you > get a dual-band radio that works on 2.4Ghz and 5Ghz. > It looks like there are a range of Atheros devices, all cheaper than buying them from anywhere else I've looked. Unless anyone pipes up with a horror story, I'll try an AR9287 since it's cheap enough that I won't get too upset if it all goes pear shaped. I can't find any reports of problems with that device, though it has only recently become supported (should work with the kernel currently in testing/unstable/backports AFAICT). Of course, I couldn't find any *recent* reports of problems with the AR5008 you mention either, so perhaps I'm not looking hard enough. > Hope this helps somewhat. > > I think so - especially the mention of that specific driver as a good choice helps narrow down the field. Thanks for your input. Next I need to figure out what antennas I need to get. I'll try to report back if it ends in success - or disaster. Nye -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/aanlktikzvibhqvpvhj5kxekdbogtgnucpoyodgpzw...@mail.gmail.com
