http://www.osnews.com/story/17417/New_Linux_WLAN_Subsystem_Integrated_Into_mm_Kernel_Tree Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:27:21 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread?218314 http://osnews.com/thread?218314 i welcome this as someone who uses the rt2500 driver and can't get 2x00 to work with fedora. i also don't like the ipw3945d approach i'm forced to use on my other laptop.

i wonder if they'll get networkmanager to finally work too.... Sat, 03 Mar 2007 23:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (simo) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218315 http://osnews.com/thread?218315 I had the same result, only with Gentoo, on the rt2500 driver situation. Good to see some progress being made in that department. Sat, 03 Mar 2007 23:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (drewunwired) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218316 http://osnews.com/thread?218316 > Intel's ipw3945 driver will be implemented without the need for a proprietary deamon.
Just ordered my new laptop from http://www.emperorlinux.com
It was great to specify an Intel 950 at order-time, instead of a less-open chip.
Just my way of sticking it to the opaque binary pusher. Sat, 03 Mar 2007 23:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (smitty_one_each) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218333 http://osnews.com/thread?218333 I've been waiting for this, so that I can use both WPA and hidden SSIDs with my bcm43xx. It's a pain to have MacOSX running under Mac-On-Linux with the sole purpose of connecting to the WiFi of my univeristy. Kudos to Devicescape Software.Edited 2007-03-04 02:13 Sun, 04 Mar 2007 02:12:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Sodki) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218334 http://osnews.com/thread?218334 ...that this will, as they suggest, give the whole ecosystem of WLAN driver efforts a strong common platform to work with, which will see those drivers progress faster.

At the end of the day, your success with WLAN hardware is still heavily contingent on the particular driver that's available for it. As a Broadcom sufferer I was very excited when the reverse-engineered driver appeared, but after extensive tryouts it remained less useful to me than the Wintel driver + ndiswrapper (no ad-hoc support). When Devicescape is available in the Gentoo kernels I'll definitely give it another whirl, but I remain fatalistic as to what results I'll see in the short-to-mid term. Sun, 04 Mar 2007 02:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Havin_it) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218348 http://osnews.com/thread?218348 Someone knows if it's possible to get a BCM43xx based card works with WPA2?

It's all I need now to get Kubuntu on my laptop ;-) Sun, 04 Mar 2007 04:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rx182) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218353 http://osnews.com/thread?218353 The newest NetworkManager will include native support for WPA2. The KDE equivalent, KNetworkManager, should include support for this in Feisty, the next version of Ubuntu due out in April.

Not that I know about Kubuntu, but I am happily surfing using WPA2 right now on my Ubuntu Feisty Laptop (HP zd1000) using bcm43xx.

It looks like this:
http://static.flickr.com/74/171380920_2ac40e9f40_o.png
http://static.flickr.com/74/171380918_79e25ad32b_o.png Sun, 04 Mar 2007 04:39:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (SEJeff) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218358 http://osnews.com/thread?218358 Awesome! Finally, I will be able to use Kubuntu on my laptop! Sun, 04 Mar 2007 06:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rx182) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218368 http://osnews.com/thread?218368 I hope it wouldn't be a wind up to say I'm using an rt2500 wireless card in Ubuntu and it just worked, even the GUI tools, same for Kubuntu.

This is, however, great news. Sun, 04 Mar 2007 09:42:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Gone fishing) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218400 http://osnews.com/thread?218400 Since you can't have two network stacks at once, then we will have a lot a drivers for the old network stack that can't be used with the new one, right? So what's the point of this? Sun, 04 Mar 2007 15:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Invincible Cow) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218428 http://osnews.com/thread?218428 From the article:

It was made clear that there is still some work to do and that the driver is not ready for inclusion - yet. However, it was also made clear that it is not too far away, as realistic aims kernels 2.6.23 or 2.6.24 were mentioned.

The mm tree is kind of a testbed for new developments, that will probably find its way to the mainline kernel, so that driver developers can accommodate to them and more bugfixing/testing can be done.

Porting open source drivers over to the new environment until this stack hits the mainline should be a quite straight forward process (giving, that this development has been announced for quite some time and - again citing the article - most newer developments have focused already on the new stack) and wrt binary-loop drivers: Well, nobody ever guaranteed binary compability, right? Sun, 04 Mar 2007 16:52:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (h times nue equals e) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218462 http://osnews.com/thread?218462 Why can't you have two network stacks at once?? I'm not saying you'd want to, but I also don't see the technical limitation and it is an intelligent thing to do in the interim before drivers get ported over to the new stack. Sun, 04 Mar 2007 19:26:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (PlatformAgnostic) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218530 http://osnews.com/thread?218530 Hi, I'm pretty dumb when it comes to kernel architecture and development, so excuse this question please: Does this mean that if I find an -mm patched kernel for my distro that it will have better native bcm43xx support? Or is this just theoretical at this point? Thanks! Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sb56637) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218540 http://osnews.com/thread?218540 I don't know the answer to your question. But as the owner of a laptop with a Broadcom 4318, I've come to despair of support *ever* improving.

Oh, perhaps when the rest of the world is running 10gbit wireless, with early adopters trying out 100gbit, the 4318 might be well supported. But I'm not holding my breath.

If Broadcom headquarters were inundated by a freak localized tsunami tomorrow, I'd feel a little better. ;-) Mon, 05 Mar 2007 00:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (sbergman27) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218561 http://osnews.com/thread?218561 You should consider forking 20$ for Linuxant's driverloader, an excellent wrapper for the Windows drivers which allows to use Broadcom-based WiFi adapters. I use it myself and it was well worth the twenty bucks. Features and performance are excellent, and the web-based installer is easy to use.

http://www.linuxant.com/driverloader/index.php Mon, 05 Mar 2007 04:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (archiesteel) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218601 http://osnews.com/thread?218601 Since you can't have two network stacks at once, then we will have a lot a drivers for the old network stack that can't be used with the new one, right? So what's the point of this?

Which old stack? There is more than one other one out there. I guess you're talking about the in-tree stack, but I think most people now have wireless cards that don't use a driver that uses the in-tree stack. There are a lot of different wireless implementations floating around right now and by the time devicescape is in the mainline kernel it will probably support everything that that the in-tree stack supports plus a lot of previously out-of-tree drivers. Mon, 05 Mar 2007 12:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (abraxas) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218614 http://osnews.com/thread?218614 it is not there (2.6.21-rc2-mm1). So I am not convinced than new WLAN was implemented really. Checking changelog for both kernel 2.6.21.-rc2 and 2.6.21-mm1 did not show anything new in terms of WLAN

I am surprised that ubuntu just now introduced support for wpa2. Mon, 05 Mar 2007 14:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (broch) Comments http://osnews.com/thread?218989 http://osnews.com/thread?218989 You're using the rt2500 driver, not the new rt2x00 driver, right? Tue, 06 Mar 2007 14:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (drewunwired) Comments