[gNewSense-users] My report on using the ASUS WL-107G PCMCIA card

[J.B. Nicholson-Owens]

Anthony Patarini wrote:
> Yep, that's been my experience. It's actually one of two wireless 
> devices the FSF explicitly recommends and has officially used it (so you 
> can be fairly sure there is no nonfree firmware needed). The other is a 
> USB device. It's on the page I linked before. I haven't used it in a 
> while, but I researched its Free-ness before I bought it and never had 
> any trouble getting it to work on Ubuntu Warty and Hoary. Hope that helps.

I have tried the ASUS WL-107g Card Bus device (purchased from NewEgg, as 
recommended) and I'm writing to confirm to the readers that Patarini is 
right: it works perfectly right out of the box.  Plug it in, reboot, 
activate the device with the GUI Network control panel, and it works. 
It doesn't "see" all the networks I'd like it to, but it works for the 
one wireless network I care about most.

I can't quite get it going the way I expected with NetworkManager, but 
I'm guessing that something is either set oddly for me or perhaps 
there's a bug with NetworkManager's ability to handle multiple network 
devices properly (this laptop has built-in wireless which requires 
non-free firmware to work fully, so I'm not expecting it to work under 
gNewSense GNU/Linux, hence the purchase of the ASUS card).

NetworkManager's GNOME icon "spins" endlessly when I try to activate the 
ASUS device on a network.  No connection ever starts.  If I uninstall 
NetworkManager packages and use the manual start of the network control 
panel, it comes up when I start up the machine and login and continues 
working.  To me this says that indeed, I can use it and something is 
awry with NetworkManager.

Thanks again Anthony Patarini for the good advice.  I'll recommend this 
ASUS device in the future.