I am trying to help a friend make use of an older (8 yrs.) HP Pavilion desktop computer. It used to have Windows XP installed. We wiped the HDD using the “shred” command on a Knoppix live distro, then installed Open SUSE. He wants to purchase a Wifi card (inexpensive), but can’t seem to find a reasonably priced adapter with Linux drivers available. He is not computer literate. He looked at the Belkin USB Wifi adapter, and the NetGear adapter (both at Best Buy), but they claim to only support Windows.
Does anybody have any suggestions for an inexpensive Wifi card that will work with Open SUSE, and for which drivers are readily available? Preferably, the card would have 802.11g/n and WPA capability (although 802.11n is not necessary).
On 01/29/2014 05:16 PM, deesy58 wrote:
>
> Hi.
>
> I am trying to help a friend make use of an older (8 yrs.) HP Pavilion
> desktop computer. It used to have Windows XP installed. We wiped the
> HDD using the “shred” command on a Knoppix live distro, then installed
> Open SUSE. He wants to purchase a Wifi card (inexpensive), but can’t
> seem to find a reasonably priced adapter with Linux drivers available.
> He is not computer literate. He looked at the Belkin USB Wifi adapter,
> and the NetGear adapter (both at Best Buy), but they claim to only
> support Windows.
>
> Does anybody have any suggestions for an inexpensive Wifi card that will
> work with Open SUSE, and for which drivers are readily available?
> Preferably, the card would have 802.11g/n and WPA capability (although
> 802.11n is not necessary).
Most Belkin and Netgear adapters are supported by Linux, even if the box doesn’t
know about it.
The necessary info is the USB or PCI ID, but that might be hard to get. Next
best is the make, model and version. All modern cards support WPA and 802.11n.
If you give us that info, we should be able to tell if that one is supported.
My friend called me from Best Buy. The device he was looking at was the Belkin F9L 1001. That’s as much as I know. He would probably purchase whatever adapter was recommended to him, as long as it wasn’t too expensive.
On 01/29/2014 05:56 PM, deesy58 wrote:
>
> My friend called me from Best Buy. The device he was looking at was the
> Belkin F9L 1001. That’s as much as I know. He would probably purchase
> whatever adapter was recommended to him, as long as it wasn’t too
> expensive.
According to the Web, that device uses r8712u as the driver. That one has been
in the kernel since 2.6.27, and should work “out-of-the-box” as lond as the
kernel-firmware package is installed.