General buying advice for wireless cards

For best security and forward compatibility, choose a wireless card that supports the WPA2 standard.

However, when connecting to public "wi-fi hotspots", typically no encryption at all is used, and a cheaper card may work for that.

Besides WPA, there is an older standard called WEP that provides some encryption, but is no longer considered secure.

The following recommendations are for WEP cards, which are lower cost and may still be of interest to some home users, as well as those primarily using the cards at public wi-fi hotspots.

WEP Cards

The Orinico Gold 802.11b WEP wireless card is a great product that is very well supported by Linux.

Locally, at least four of us are using this kind of card in our laptops with good results.

If this link to the 2wire refurbished cards still works, you are in luck. Pick one up for about $35 including shipping.

Using the wireless card could be as easy as inserting it into the machine and connecting to a public wi-fi network.

For a more complete list, see the Free Software Foundations (long!) list of wireless cards that work well with Free Software and Linux.

PCI Wireless Cards

OfficeMax sells a Linksys Wireless-G "WMP54G v4.1" PCI wireless card. This is the style made to go in desktop computers. In August, 2007, these sold for about $50, and were found to be compatible with Ubuntu Feisty (7.04) Linux.