Posted by arf in : Linux, Technology , trackback
So I have this MythTV box setup in my living room. Since I didn’t want to string a long network cable through the apartment, I decided to setup my pci wireless card in it.
I worked for a while but due to some incompatibilities in the Linux 2.6 kernel that comes with Fedora Core 4 and the opensource ndiswrapper project, the computer would occasionally lock up. For more on this check out the Fedora distro page at the wiki.
So I decided to go buy one of the Linksys wireless game adapters (WGA54G) from Best Buy. Now I realize that they are originally meant for use with an XBox or PlayStation 2, but they are essentially a wireless bridge.
You hook the device up to the network card and it clones the MAC address and grabs an IP from your wireless router.
What Linksys doesn’t tell you in the documentation is that if your router is set to G-Only then you will need to change it to mixed mode first or it won’t connect. Also they don’t bother to make it clear in the beginning that the device clones the MAC address of the wired-card. So, if you have the wireless MAC filter enabled on the router you will need the MAC address of the game adapter and the MAC address of the wired card in the list of enabled devices.
Oh and the only way to change the transmission mode of the game adapter from mixed mode to G-only is through the web interface on the adapter which you can only access through the device that is hooked up to the adapter.
Of course, none of this is in the user’s guide that comes with device. Good game Linksys, your team of technical writers gets a C- for thoroughness.