Additional wireless card information

[splorp]

The following information was provided by Paul Guyot.

The first point seems to be included in the existing question: Can I use a wireless card in my Newton?

Need to double check the card types that are specifically mentioned.

There are two things that can be provided in the FAQ.

1) The actual list (Hiroshi's list, with additions from clones of the 
cards he has, and cards supported thanks to my patch, namely Linksys 
WPC11v3 and Proxim OEM C28-1076Pv1).

2) What happens and how to figure out if a card could work.

A draft for the second part:

Hiroshi's driver relies on Lantern (also know as Newton Devices, cf 
the Glossary). Consequently, it registers with Lantern a list of card 
internal names that are supposed to work.
Will work with his driver and no additional software all the cards 
with these names, namely all the cards above (I suppose you will put 
the list first) and exact clones of these (typically OEM cards).

However, what Hiroshi's driver actually works with is chipsets of 
cards. There aren't dozens of these, although most chipset 
manufacturers came out with several versions of their chipsets.

Consequently, with a little patch or with Hiroshi's help, you can get 
cards working that use the same chipsets at the cards he actually 
supports, but with different internal names. This is  what happens 
with the More Wifi Cards patch package distributed with the Lantern 
patch (I will update this package with the Proxim card later this 
week).

Finally, cards available for sale do not come with a chipset name 
written in capital letters on them. The easiest way to know if a card 
can possibly have a chipset compatible with Hiroshi's driver is to 
look for the compatibility charts or compatibility questions and 
replies on the web for the common open source and other general 
purpose drivers. If the card you want to use is mentioned as not 
compatible with open source or general purpose drivers available for 
other platforms (say BSDs, Linux, MacOS X), then it will probably not 
work with Hiroshi's driver. But if your card is compatible with most 
open source and general purpose drivers for these operating systems, 
it might well use a chipset that Hiroshi's driver can handle, and 
thus with (if required) a little trick to register the card's name 
with Lantern, you can get it working.

Please note that not only there can be mistakes in the previous list, 
but buying a card to try to get it working is at your sole risk. 
Additionally, two cards with the same name but with a different 
internal version can use two different chipsets. For example, the 
Linksys WPC11v3 is compatible with Hiroshi's driver, but the Linksys 
WPC11v4 is not (and it is incompatible with most general purpose 
drivers out there).