ndiswrapper missing?

Gerry Tool gstool at earthlink.net
Tue Mar 7 22:24:41 UTC 2006


On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 16:38 -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
> On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 01:31:09PM -0800, Josh wrote:
>  > Hello testers,
>  >  
>  >  After a fresh FC5T3 install, i was configuring my USB wireless network
>  >  dongle and couldn't find ndiswrapper on the FC5T3 CD.
> 
> it's deliberatly not shipped.
> 
>  >  I may have overlooked. Is there a reason not to bundle ndiswrapper with FC5T3?
> 
> - it creates a situation where if you get a kernel bug, I'm not even going
>   to look at it, because *anything* could have happened, and as the driver
>   is effectively binary only, there's nothing I can do about it.
> 
> - it reinforces the message to hardware vendors that it's ok to not
>   release documentation or native Linux drivers, because 'they can just use
>   the windows driver'.  This is not a 'might happen' btw, there are already
>   companies saying this when you call them to ask for documentation.
> 
>   The fact that other distros are shipping this is really sad.
> 
> Given a lot of ex-Windows users fled that platform because they were tired
> of crashes, I'm amazed that people now want to run the drivers from it, when
> a lot of the time, they were the cause of the problems.
> 
> I know it sucks to have hardware that you can't use.  I've got a similar
> device myself that doesn't work right now. But there's hope that at
> some point the bcm43xx driver will work with it.  Testing, and providing
> feedback to developers of *native* drivers is the direction we want
> to be headed toward.

I currently have a laptop with a Linksys pcmcia wifi card that as far as
I know doesn't have a native Linux driver, so I use ndiswrapper on
Ubuntu on that machine.

I would really like to install FC5 and native wifi support on that
computer.  Where can I find an authoritative list of "802.11g" pcmcia
cards that are supported by native Linux drivers?  I am more than
willing to scrap the Linksys card and buy a new one if I _know_ it will
work.

Thanks.  Gerry





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