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PCI

The vast majority of networking devices are built-in PCI devices (e.g., ethernet cards, built-in WiFi). Many of the wired ethernet cards are already supported in Linux. However, only a few wireless devices (namely the Atheros, Prism and RT chipsets) have native Linux drivers, and many of them aren't distributed with Linux due to licensing reasons.

We recommend installing native Linux drivers where possible. A notable exception is the Broadcom driver, which has flaky support for many of the chipsets and doesn't run at its maximum speed (as of early '08). Many other cards are supported using NDISwrapper and the appropriate NDIS driver, which can normally be obtained on your wireless driver CD or for free over the internet.