And once again I have to ask the lazyweb for some help. This time is to decide what hardware to buy, for a wireless PCI card.
I’m cleaning up my office as I write, I removed almost everything from the room, I just have some stuff on the floor to pick up, and as a result I’ll just have the two desks in it. Then it will be time to re-cable it entirely, as I did for my bedroom last september, and finally to put some new furniture in it (not exactly new because they are things that were downstair in the living room before, but new for my office at least).
Right now I only have here my laptop (as I have work’s stuff on it), the external harddisk for the laptop, where most of the data is, the old UPS as it’s slimmer and the harddisk’s PSU does not care about the waveform, and the IP phone, to receive calls, at least for what concerns computer stuff. I removed Enterprise this morning, together with its three monitors, the AV receiver and the bigger UPS.
One thing that this cleanup made me realise is that I only have one box here that is connected to the wired network segment. I gave Prakesh back to the friend who lent it to me for a while, while Farragut and Klothos are turned down for now in my mother’s bedroom, the IP phone is using DECT, while the base connected to the network is downstair together with the ADSL router. Why should I use a Linksys router to connect that? Okay it’s way easier to get network from rescue CDs, but it’s a waste of power at a minimum, as it has its own PSU which is likely to waste energy in heat. Additionally, it’s two more cables in an already messy office.
So I’m pondering adding a PCI wifi card, either to Enterprise or to the new box I’m going to buy as soon as I’m paid. The problem is to find a good card, very well compatible with Linux (Gentoo in particular, but I suppos that is not a problem, at the worst I’ll be working on adding support for it), 802.11n if at all possible, but not requested. I don’t have 802.11n network here, but I have at least two devices that are compatible with that (the MacBook Pro and the AppleTV), and I’d suspect more stuff to come).
If anybody has a suggestion, it would be very kind of you to share it with me 🙂