Wifi for the SAM440ep

I do posses a SAM440ep cased in a Mini ITX NOAH3988 with 80 W power supply

the HD is of 2.5 " type and according to the specs this still allows me to use the existing PCI connector for a Wifi card eg the one proposed by Amikit for the AmigOne 500
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/c ... _info.php?products_id=158
£ 29.95
Alternatively i could buy an external ethernet to Wifi adapter, which surely is easier to install and i guess has its own power supply.

Does OS4.1 update 3 support susch an adapter?
Who has experience with this and what would you recommend?

You will need a Prism2 PCI card. AmigaKit is the only place you are likely to find one for sale these days, they are rather old. The driver is on Aminet/OS4Depot, but if you want to use WPA you will need the registered version.

Also, WPA means you will have to upgrade the firmware on the Wifi card, which is not for the faint-hearted & requires the use of a Windows or Linux PC with a free PCI slot.

Sadly AmigaKit do not sell the Wifi card with the firmware already upgraded, AFAIR.

@JosDuchIt
I use a Netgear WNCE2001 ethernet adapter. It can be powered from it's own small plugin power supply or with a USB cable. You simply plug it into your SAM ethernet port with a short ethernet cable and connect the USB power cable into a USB port. That way, when you power on your computer the WiFi adapter is powered on too. It has a settings page that you access with your browser and has DHCP builtin. The device is smaller than a pack of cigarettes and doesn't take up much space. I think a big advantage for your system would be the fact that you won't need to use up your PCI slot to get WiFi. I'm using it on a SAM Flex and have only run into one problem. If I forget to turn on my wireless router before turning on the computer (and Wifi adapter), the DHCP in the wireless ethernet adapter will assign the IP addresses and prevent me from accessing the router. However, that might be a RoadShow problem or a problem with my lack of networking knowledge. A quick warm reboot gets me online once I turn on the router.

@Xenic

I bought the Netgear WNCE2001 33 Euro from amazon.fr
Unpacked it, connected it, tried to use the browser and got the Netgear settings instructions, one moment of panic to find the WEP key on my router, had to reboot after entering those setting, and that was all.

Speed seems not affected.
I gained more freedom to work where i want.

Thank you very much for the suggestion

@JosDuchIt
Quote:
I have seen speed affected by a lot of neighboring WiFi signals but that was more of a router issue. I live in an apartment and there are a lot of WiFi signals nearby. I initially had my router set on automatic channel selection but it wasn't picking the best channel for some reason. I had to manually change the router to use an empty channel. I'm glad the adapter worked out for you.

@Chris

Quote:

i've been very pleased with the netgear MA311 PCI card in my SAM for some time. they're actually much more numerous than you might imagine. ebay, for example, has several for sale. they work well with the prism2 driver on os4depot; i haven't tried neil's updated drivers, though. did he make any changes other than the authentication methods it supports?

-- eliyahu

@eliyahu

Mine's a 3Com, that was all I could find at the time without silly money being involved, but I can't fault it - it has been rock solid (I had trouble finding drivers that it would work with under XP, in order to upgrade the firmware though!). I'm pretty sure I looked for the NetGear but couldn't find any (I worked through most of the compatibility list). This was about four years ago so I probably caught the lul between Prism2 cards being readily available, and people selling their old ones!

The only other visible change in the new drivers is they now do network scanning. The config file can contain a list of networks and it will connect to whichever one it finds first. I have mine set to my home network and then "any unencrypted network". It seemlessly connects to the correct one whether I'm at home or ANT, something which required manual tweaking previously.