Let me get geeky for a bit. I recently decided that I was not going to be the last person on earth without wireless access, so I marched off to CompUSA to buy a wifi card for my G3 Powerbook (Pismo). I know, I know, I should have checked the hardware compatibility lists, but ever impatient, I thought, how bad could it be? I’ll buy two and if one doesn’t work, I’ll stick in the other.
Neither worked.
Bah! Curse my passionate self. I erred in the predictable fashion. I fell victim to the classic blunder, the most famous of which is never get involved in a land war in Asia, but only slightly less known is this: with Linux you must research. With Linux on the PowerPC, you must research and pray.
So, first of all, the Broadcom family of chips (Apple’s Airport, Motorola, and a bunch of others will not work with Linux on PPC). With Linux on Intel, you’re okay, because you have ndiswrapper with which to run your Windows drivers in Linux. However, with PPC you will have no such luck, as ndiswrapper is strictly an Intel x86 endeavor. No, with PPC your best bet (as I later found out) is to buy one of the D-Link family of products. From what I can tell, they have native support across the board in Linux (my own card, a DWL-G630 – 802.11g, works flawlessly).
To get it working, you first have to install the drivers from the madwifi project (your distro should have it available for installation), make sure you have PCMCIA drivers installed, and you’re now spilling coffee on your keyboard at one of the many nationwide Starbucks locations.
The biggest challenge was figuring out which brand of wifi card supports Linux natively – because NONE of them say so. They all say "Windows 9x, 2000, XP, and 2003."
After two trips to CompUSA, I now have a D-Link card and my working laptop. Remote X works, and I get about 1 megabyte/sec transfer rate through the concrete walls of my home.
And now you know the rest of the story. D-Link, D-Link, D-Link!