I attempted in vain for an entire night (until the morning, naturally) to do everything in my power to get the RaLink RT61 chipset on this Linksys card running. I’d bought it at a local Wal-Mart for $50 because I was too impatient to do my homework like a good little geek and go to NewEgg like I had for the new laptop. (More on that later!)

[1] RaLink provides drivers for this chipset, but the three options—NdisWrapper, compile the driver natively and install as a module, and the beta software available out there is apparently so beta it should be considered alpha to most who don’t want to pull their hair out.

If you want to do your own research, check out [2] NdisWrapper, the above RaLink URL, and Google “[3] Linux RT61“.

(Be sure to check your version number, though; v4.0 of this card uses the older, more stable and more community-supported RT2500 chipset.)

Round two? The [4] EDIMAX EW-7325IG from NewEgg, with a Linux-compatible Atheros chipset. We’ll see how it works out.

I attempted in vain for an entire night (until the morning, naturally) to do everything in my power to get the RaLink RT61 chipset on this Linksys card running. I’d bought it at a local Wal-Mart for $50 because I was too impatient to do my homework like a good little geek and go to NewEgg like I had for the new laptop. (More on that later!)

[5] RaLink provides drivers for this chipset, but the three options—NdisWrapper, compile the driver natively and install as a module, and the beta software available out there is apparently so beta it should be considered alpha to most who don’t want to pull their hair out.

If you want to do your own research, check out [6] NdisWrapper, the above RaLink URL, and Google “[7] Linux RT61“.

(Be sure to check your version number, though; v4.0 of this card uses the older, more stable and more community-supported RT2500 chipset.)

Round two? The [8] EDIMAX EW-7325IG from NewEgg, with a Linux-compatible Atheros chipset. We’ll see how it works out.