A walkthrough of wireless (IEEE 802.11 also known as WiFi) home networking with Linux.
Most wireless adapters are not designed for use in Linux and depend on non-free proprietary drivers and firmware which inevitably leads to problems. There has been a significant effort by the Linux community and some manufacturers to improve this situation and most recently released Linux distributions will support a significant number of wireless cards.
The Ubuntu Wifi Documentation is a good, and frequently updated, guide to what cards are supported on recent Ubuntu versions (recent versions of other distributions should have similar levels of support). It also lists cards which have Free Software drivers - for users who have a philosophical (or other) objection to closed-source drivers in their kernel.



