On Wed, 9 Jan 2002, Mike Hicks wrote: > I recently bought a laptop (looks like it's been delivered, but is > sitting in my apartment building's office tonight), and am looking at > getting a wireless card for it. Since 802.1x is the Next Big Thing, > do I have to worry about hardware supporting that, or is it just a > software layer, or what? If you want one that "just works", go Aironet or Orinoco. Drivers for both of those are in the stock PCMCIA distribution, and don't require any playing. If you want a card you can use in Host AP mode, go buy a Prism2-based card. It requires a bit of playing to get working, but you can do all sorts of cool tweaks with the cards that you can't do with Cisco/Orinoco. Inexpensive route: http://store.yahoo.com/justdeals/proxran80wir1.html This card is a relabeled ZComax XI-300 (Prism2 chipset), with older firmware (updating the firmware is kind of a chore on this card; but it can be done) It only works in 3.3v PCMCIA slots, which means it only works in newer laptops, but it also sucks less power. This card is only $45, which kills the price of any other card. One really neat feature is it has a removable antenna, so you can hook up an external high-gain antenna if you so desire. On the 802.1x topic, it's going to require new hardware from what I've read, but nobody has it yet -- so if you need wireless now, it's not worth waiting around for it. If you can wait a year or two, by all means, wait a year or two. :) -- Nate Carlson <natecars at real-time.com> | Phone : (952)943-8700 http://www.real-time.com | Fax : (952)943-8500