Which mini pci wireless card? Intel or atheros?

English Network/Internet
#1

I’m going to buy a new 11n wireless card for my laptop.

I have narrowed my choices down to two:

HALF SIZE ATHEROS 802.11n AR9287 Mini Pci express card on eBay (end time 06-Jan-11 15:07:37 GMT)

OR

INTEL 5100 Wireless Half Mini PCI-E Card 512AN_HMW G/N on eBay (end time 10-Jan-11 03:16:53 GMT)

My questions are:

Which is better spec?
Which has better compatibility with Linux?
Which is newer?
Which of these would allow packet injection with backtrack?

I am ofcourse running openSuse 11.3 on a HP 311c (wicked btw!).

Thanks in advance!

#2

Did you check here
HCL:Network (Wireless) - openSUSE

#3

I had a quick look but does not seem to contain anything specific.

I was leaning towards the intel one as they are usually open source. But the atheros seems to be quite good and newer.

#4

I have 2 notebooks/laptops
One has intel, the other broadcom

The intel works out of the box
My broadcom uses the wl driver from Packman

I have to say. The broadcom device is fantastic, super fast speeds.
It can actually use the b43 driver from the kernel, but the wl is just better ATM.

Atheros: ? No experience myself

#5

Both Intel and Atheros have relatively large groups working on wireless drivers
for Linux. I don’t think you could go wrong with either.

#6

My last three laptops all had Atheros cards. The first needed the madwifi driver, after that completely out of the box.

#7 
02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Atheros Communications Inc. AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) [168c:002b] (rev 01)
        Subsystem: Device [1a3b:1089]
        Kernel driver in use: ath9k

I have got this card and it works out of the box with openSUSE. The driver is already included in the kernel, however the windows driver for this one is better IMHO as it supports n. On openSUSE I can only get 54Mbits but I hope this will change with the latest ath9k driver. I guess the atheros card you’re considering will be using the same driver (but that’s just a guess).

Best regards,
Greg