Testing Wireless Cards

Testing method for WiFi PC Cards (ver. 3)

1. Set up a laptop which is not cabled to the LAN. Preferably, it should have no WiFi internal card; remove if practical.
2. Insert into PC Card Slot. Watch for a power LED on the card (One light good; two lights gooder). Reboot if none appears and go to step 2 after login; if the power LED appears, go to step 2 now.
3. Watch the WiFi signal strength meter in the panel for 60 secs. If it starts hunting for a connection, chances are good it will work.
4. In a terminal window, run a shell script which does

   lspci | grep Network | grep -v 00:

   iwconfig | grep wlan | grep -v wlan0

5. The first line returned by the script tells the chipset; the last line returned by the script tells if the card worked.
6. If the card worked, apply a sticker which says OK, the letter B if 802.11b or G if 802.11G, and the chipset found.
7. If the chipset was found but the Freegeek wireless network was not found, use a Sharpie and mark that on the card after a bold X
8. If the chipset was not found, reboot the PC and try again. If, after reboot, the chipset still was not found, put a bold XX on the card with a Sharpie.
9. Sort the cards by working (5), retest X (6) and retest XX (7). The retest cards should be tested in a significantly different machine.

check out this page, also: Wireless card compatibility list