USB Wifi Adapter

[DrACoNuS]

I recently purchased a sekzy little 12" ibook g4 and am running gentoo with kernel 2.6.3 with all my hardware working perfectly except for the airport extreme (broadcom chipset)

So.. I am in the market for a USB wifi client adapter until there is native linux support for my internal adapter.

I can score a good deal ($40 CND) on a SMC 2662W which uses the atmel chipset. I think this style of adapter would be ideal, since i can position it away from the laptop with a USB cable for optimal signal.

I was looking at a netgear MA111 $50CND which looks like a usb memory stick, I know that it has a prism2 chipset however it cannot be positioned like the SMC. The linksys equivalent is the WUSB12 which also looks like a USB flash memory stick. I can't imagine reception would be that great on these devices however ive never tried one.

I believe the latest (revision 2.6) WUSB11 from linksys uses the atmel chipset as well. Which I find odd since the 2.5 revision used the prism2 chipset i believe. Is the atmel chipset superior?

Does anyone have any suggestions/comments and or words of wisdom regarding an ideal solution. All these devices tend to be in the same price range and I can get most of them at cost through my friend.

FYI- I am currently using a WAP54G access point from linksys. It also uses a broadcom chipset and I get amazing results speed/range with my internal airport extreme (broadcom) adapter while booted into OSX. I would imagine this access point should interface well with any of the devices mentioned above.

It is too bad broadcom has yet to release a linux driver for the chip in my mactop. Although its always fun to get new toys

I think I'll pick the SMC2662W up tonight and give it a test run, I can always exchange it for a different device.
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[DrACoNuS]

I bought the SMC 2662 and hooked it up, it took a lot of work to get it running however I'm impressed with the performance.

Would something with the prism chipset integrate a little more seamlessly.. i mean it took A LOT of work to get this adapter working hehe.

I still might return this and order a Netgear MA111 online. What are your experiences with the Prism based wifi adapters?
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Is that a huge bandwidth or are you just happy to see me?

[madmango]

I haven't had any expierence with the prisim ones, but you'd want to use linux-wlan-ng. I think, because of that, the support might be a little better. I still can't get my atmel drivers to compile right.

Oh, and linksys actually switched from atmel chips (<=v.24) to prisim (v2.5) back to atmel (v2.6, ,v2.. Wierd.
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