Quest for linux supported Wireless

[Vladimir G. Ivanovic]

Some corrections: 

1. Not all D-Link cards use TI chips. Mine (DWL-G650 B3) uses an Atheros
   AR5212 a/b/g chip.

2. Not all chip makers are bozo's. In particular Atheros was more than
   willing to release the sources for their Hardware Abstraction Layer
   ... until they found out that the FCC does not permit software
   defined radio devices (like WiFi cards) to have user-modifiable
   frequencies. Hence the file hal.c, and only the file hal.c is
   delivered as hal.o. The file hal.h is available, as is the rest of
   the driver. (See the MadWiFi project on SourceForge.)

   See http://outageschedules.beradio.com/magazinearticle.asp?magazineid=135&releaseid=8431&magazinearticleid=121016&siteid=15#sdr_fcc
   for more info.

   It is unlikely that *any* WiFi chip maker -- bozo or not -- will
   release the sources to *all* of their WiFi drivers until the FCC
   changes its ruling.

--- Vladimir

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Vladimir G. Ivanovic                        http://leonora.org/~vladimir
2770 Cowper St.                                         vladimir at acm.org
Palo Alto, CA 94306-2447                                 +1 650 678 8014
------------------------------------------------------------------------

>>>>> "rs" == Rick Stevens <rstevens at vitalstream.com> writes:

    rs> Gerry Doris wrote:
    >> I've been trying to find a wireless solution that is supported under linux.
    >> D-Link flat out say their products aren't supported.  LinkSys said
    >> there
    >> are 3rd party drivers that will work with their products but they wouldn't
    >> recommend them.
    >> However, I see that NetGear do claim some of their products are
    >> supported
    >> under linux.  I would appreciate anyone sharing their experience with
    >> NetGear's products when using Fedora.  In particular, I'm interested in
    >> their new 108MB/s WGT624 router and WG311T PCI card.
    >> If NetGear isn't supported then what are people using???
    rs> 
    rs> Just putting this out again...
    rs> 
    rs> If you have W98/ME/2K/2K3 drivers available (the .sys and .inf files),
    rs> you can use the ndiswrapper driver (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net)
    rs> to use those files under Linux.  I've used it on D-Link, Broadcom,
    rs> Linksys, Cisco and a bunch of other wireless cards.
    rs> 
    rs> Is it native?  No.
    rs> Is it pretty?  No.
    rs> Does it work?  Yes.
    rs> 
    rs> This will continue to be the case until we can convince the bozo chip
    rs> makers out there (D-Link's 802.11g stuff uses TI chips for example) to
    rs> release the API or specs on the chips to the open source community.  I
    rs> don't see what they have to lose and they stand to gain the open source
    rs> users (Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc.) as clients.  Seems a reasonable
    rs> thing to me, but I'm biased.
    rs> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    rs> - Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
    rs> - VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
    rs> -                                                                    -
    rs> -   "Do you suffer from long-term memory loss?"  "I don't remember"  -
    rs> -                            -- Chumbawumba, "Amnesia" (TubThumping) -
    rs> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
    rs> 
    rs> 
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