Mageia forum

im trying to get a friend up and running on there old laptop a P4 based samsung.

trying to find a pcmcia card that works, that i can then search for on ebay.

as the usb sockets on this old laptop mean its likly to get broken off.

any confirmed working would be nice to here from please, hopefully with firmware in the non free pack.

ive already taken a punt with a prism 3 , very old firmware, and just wont connect with wpa or wep.

works ok unencrypted.

regards peter

No specific device, but you can try to filter at http://linux-wless.passys.nl/ or look through the complete list http://linux-wless.passys.nl/query_alles.php
It allows to filter between PCMCIA and other interfaces, and additionally for the chipset used. Most information there might be a bit 'dated, but then PCMCIA cards are not really new and available since quite a few years.
In general I'd recommend Atheros, something ath5k, as I'm not sure how well the old chipsets (prism, orinoco) are supported nowadays.

Other then that, only other recommendation would be to ask on the Mageia mailing lists, at least on dev and discuss to reach different users.

Short forum search only shows a "conceptronic c300rc" viewtopic.php?f=8&t=2605
Although according to http://wiki.ubuntuusers.de/WLAN/Karten/Conceptronic they use either Ralink or Realtek chipset, and might require ndiswrapper ...
Other occurence is an intel 2200BG card: viewtopic.php?f=15&t=2191

You might try loading a very old distro onto the laptop to see if there is support in it for any pcmcia cards. If you can get it to work, then at least you will know what drivers need to be forward-ported to work on a modern distro.

This presumes that no one is keeping drivers for pcmcia current, and I don't know whether anyone is or not.

Forward-porting from any of the 2.6 kernels to a modern kernel is not really such a big deal; I've done it many times.

based on a thread running in the ubuntu forums i bought one of these of ebay

TP Link TL-WN310G 54mbps Cardbus PCMCIA Wireless Card

it is ath5k based

and it works perfectly

regards peter