Install D-Link DWL-650+ WLAN Device under Linux

For some old WLAN cards like DWL-650+ from D-Link no official drivers for Linux has been released. Furthermore during the installation process the card cannot be installed. There exist some third party device drivers that support those devices, but these are hard to find and often doesn’t work very well. Especially, the DWL-650+ causes problems in combination with Fedora 8. Sometimes it seems to work and sometimes it doesn’t.
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Install D-Link DWL-650+ WLAN Device under Linux - Solution madwifi

Well, there is no perfect solution for WLAN-Devices with various Linux distributions. However I did find a solution that seems to work pretty well with the Fedora distribution and the DWL-650+ WLAN Device. The only two drivers that I did find (and are working somehow) are madwifi and acx. The acx firmware/driver works only with a Kernel 2.6.10 and higher and doesn’t seem to be stable at all (also the installation is a little tricky). Sometimes I am able to connect to a network sometimes not and therefore it is not the solution I was looking for. The madwifi drivers on the other hand did work without flaws and installation was also quite easy (on fedora you need kernel-devel and sharutils). With a nice GUI you have not to deal with all the config-files and can easily set up your wireless network.

For further details see: http://www.hauke-m.de/w-lan/madwifi/

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