Those buggars at Speedstream
Enough Googleing eventually lead to the discovery that Speedstream, in their wisdom, changed the underlying chipset in the 1021 card I bought without changing the darn model number. So I bought it with the understanding that it would contain an Orinoco chipset (which is supported under Linux) yet I got a card with TI chipset for which only a sucky binary driver exists. That sucks. Oh well, it was only $20 bugs. Not sure if it's worth my while arguing with Circuit City about that.

/computers/wireless | permanent link

Cheap 802.11b gear
Techbargains.com came through once again: Circuit City was dumping their Siemens Speedstream line, and I picked up a wireless router / 4-port for $30, and a pcmcia card for $20.

Got the router to work rather quickly by plugging its WAN port into my existing 8-port hub; given the local DHCP server it worked right away adding a second subnet. Wireless setup was relatively straightforward under XP, Linux looks a little harder as usual.

/computers/wireless | permanent link