PCI wireless card recommendation

[abz]

Hi fellas.

I was wondering if I could pull on some of your experience with wireless PCI cards for a desktop? I would really appreciate some recommendations.

Thank you

Abz

[cylgalad]

wifi sucks, a cable is better, faster, more reliable but a pain in the ass to install across rooms
I got a Netgear wg311t (atheros chipset) and it's not working very well especially under Gentoo (crash & slow) even with an antenna... If you want to transfer big files, forget about wifi or wait for a miraculous 802.11n next year.

[ahubu]

I have a wireless setup with 2 computers running linux and a wifi card. One is a laptop with a Sweex Network card (PCMCIA). It uses a realtek chipset, and is very stable on ndiswrapper (basically a wrapper for winXP drivers).

The other is a conceptronic PCi card, and gave me some trouble, it has a Marvell chipset. I cannot recommend buying a wireless card that has no native drivers, because once in a while, ndiswrapper just causes a kernel panic when inserted in the kernel space. I have not found a solution yet, but it is working now and I dare not upgrade to kernel 2.6.13 (running .12 now). This was really weird stuff: it would panic the first 2 starts, and the 3rd start it ran without problems... This happened for about 3 weeks... and it has disappeared for some reason (having done nothing in particular). It got a strange, scary windowsfeel to it: especially since you're basically running windowsdrivers.

I have tried at least 3 different wificards, of which 3 worked with ndiswrapper (though sometimes without trouble, sometimes with trouble), one having "native" drivers (ralink) which I have not been able to get to work.

Additionally, when using ndiswrapper you will not get information about signal strength/quality at all.

Anyway, I am thinking of pulling some cables through my house anyway, because wireless can be flaky (losing connection for no reason). I must say it actually works like a charm, but this ndiswrapper stuff is one of the most unstable things I have done on my desktop machine (for laptop that would be in par with softwaresuspend2). So if you have the chance I say buy something with the prism chipset, I only heard read stories about it being supported in linux and such. But I guess a brand X card will often work in ndiswrapper... but there is no stableness guaranteed.
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