Airlink 101 AWLL3028 $10 USB WiFi adapter works automatically with Ubuntu 8.04

“That leaves users either that closed-source binary driver
(Linux is full of ’em; OpenBSD refuses to include them) or waiting
for developers from the community to either write a driver from
scratch or adapt one from another open-source project. Contrary to
what you might think, developers across the BSDs share a whole lot
of code, and the creation of a driver in, say, NetBSD, means that
developers from the other projects will be keen to look at that
code and adapt it for their flavor of OS.

“It also means that older network interfaces tend to be better
supported than newer ones. My Orinoco WaveLAN Silver PCMCIA card
for 802.11b is famous for working with EVERYTHING. I haven’t found
a computer that has a PCMCIA slot that it won’t work with. I camped
out on eBay for weeks trying to get one and was finally successful.
It works with my 1996-era Powerbook 1400 running System 7, my
1999-era Mac G4 running Debian Etch (but you can’t close the case;
and YES, Apple designed a desktop computer that uses an internal
PCMCIA card, with only Apple’s original Airport card [muy expensivo
on eBay and 802.11b only] fitting, or so it seems), my 1999-era
Compaq Armada 7770dmt and all my laptops from the first decade of
the 2000s: the Gateway Solo 1450 and the two Toshiba Satellite
1100-S101 models.”

Complete Story