I am on my 3rd USB wireless card.. I initially used the ndiswrapper package to install XP drivers for my WUSB54G and it worked with limited success.. Then I purchased the USR 5420 which would not work at all with ndiswrapper so unfortunately I had to try the linuxant driverloader which worked but caused lots of problems when loading or unplugging the device etc...

Finally, I found a USB device supported with native drivers for a few bucks at a local yard sale... so I figured why not it is the same price at the driverloader driver... long story short it works very well.. it loads quick and seems to have more signal strength.. and it is ugly as hell :P

In conclusion... I would strongly suggest you find hardware supported in linux before you purchase.. this may seem like common sence but I know a lot of people don't.. me included

/end rant

I have Ndiswrapper loaded and it works fine. But good call on the "check the hardware is supported". The LQ HCL is one such resource.

Of course, Linux Wireless Extensions support more features than Windows NDIS specifications, so even if you get a wireless card running perfectly under Linux, you'll be missing some nice features like virtual access point (Master mode) which isn't available with Windows drivers (in Windows either not, maybe only through different extensions which are non NDIS-compliant)

However sometimes I was able to get a card working ONLY with ndiswrapper - a perfect example is the ACX111 chipset. Their linux drivers are somewhat buggy, but ndiswrapped driver works fine (though, missing Master mode)

I dont want to buy expensive wireless gear, most linux supported wireless cards cost more then I have paid for all my stuff combined (including wireless router). Although I have used ndis wrapper for almost 2 years with almost 0 problems

Not true, trey. If it's "officially" supported, it probably costs more. Printers, especially, but thanks the linuxprinting.org and the foomatic, you can get away with win-printers just fine.

Wireless gear, however, is not always unsupported in Linux. Just be sure of which chipset you're buying. Cards based on the Atheros chipset work great using the native MadWiFi driver. This includes some D-Link G cards, and some Linksys G cards, neither of which is very expensive. Just be sure to check the web before buying one so you don't find yourself with a nasty surprise. I paid $75 CAD for my D-Link DWL G650 card, and it took 2 minutes to set up with MadWiFi.

I try to avoid ndiswrapper whenever I can. Most hardware works fine with native drivers, and if you've been using NDISwrapper on your hardware for 2 years, you might find that there's now kernel-level support for the hardware in question....

Hmm, I use NDISwrapper for 2 years and I'm sure there's no and I doubt there will be EVER ANY support for Broadcom chipset based cards.

Well...Broadcom chipsets are unfortunately present in many different wireless cards, especially the Belkin-branded ones.

Apparently the reason is that Broadcom chipsets use a fully software-controlled radio transceiver, and the software regulates the transmission levels to prevent it going above 200mW, which is the maximum allowed by the FCC for unlicensed radio usage.
Hence, Broadcom cannot release the technical API for their chipsets.

But, there is an effort to getting Linux-native drivers for Broadcom wireless chipsets:

http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/
http://linux-bcom4301.sourceforge.net/

A Chinese-wall development process is being used to prevent the Linux driver containing any Broadcom code, thus avoiding IP infringement.