The ASUS PCE-N13 is not especially pretty, but its cheap, fast, and officially supported!
If you are on the market for a wireless adapter for your Linux desktop, the best bang for the buck today seems to be the ASUS PCE-N13. Not only will ~30$ get you a/b/g/n support, 300Mbps transfer rates, 2 antennas and a PCIe bus, but it also says “Linux Support” right on the box, and not in some fine print in an obscure corner. The only card in my local shop to read that, although all of them work just fine. So this is a *moral* choice as well 😉
The card is indeed supported by the rt2860sta module. Unfortunately, with Both Slackware 13.37 and Ubuntu 10.10, the kernel module fails to bind to the card because the various rt2800 and rt2x00 modules conflict with rt2860sta. The module loads, but all attempts to initialize the card result in error messages. To remedy this, simply blacklist the other modules from loading by adding those modules to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf like this:
# Blacklist rt2800 and rt2x00 modules # This will allow the rt2860sta module to bind to the ASUS PCE-N13 card: blacklist rt2800lib blacklist rt2800pci blacklist rt2x00lib blacklist rt2x00pci
Tricks and Ticks 