My laptop, IBM ThinkPad A31p has a Prism 2.5 chip. It’s a good chipset: while only having 11 mbit, I have excellent reception (so I often have 11 mbit when others with their 54 mbit chipsets only have 2 mbit; and often have network where others won’t have link anymore). And mind you, unless when transferring large files 11 mbit is more than enough.

This chipset also has good driver support. There is not just one opensource driver, there are two. The first is the “orinoco” driver, the second is the “hostap” driver, which also supports host mode (i.e. running it in access point mode).

However, they differ a bit in supported features, which can be quite annoying. Hostap has much more features, and much better wireless scanning IMHO. But it’s not included with the default kernel, making installation slightly more complex (i.e. having to run “m-a a-i hostap-source” for each new kernel once).

Also sometimes the two drivers would both load, which would confuse them; the hostap driver would also (sometimes?) lock up my system on unload. Also hostap would show some mysterious “wifi0” device I still have no idea what it’s good for. Thats why I had recently disabled the hostap driver, and switched to orinoco.

However, the friend I’m staying with right now uses a WPA encrypted wireless network, and apparently the orinoco driver doesn’t support WPA. So I’m back to using the hostap driver right now.