When it comes to troublesome Linux peripherals, WiFi takes the cake. Sparked by the Portland Project's efforts to bring standardization to the Linux desktop, the Linux wireless developer community tackled this problem at its second Linux Wireless Summit last month in London.
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Member since:2005-07-10
PCLinuxOS is the only Linux distribution that I've found which has a ndiswrapper GUI wizard to assist with installing wireless windows drivers on Linux. I found it remarkably easy to get a D-Link DWL-G510 wireless card working on PCLinuxOS than compared to using the same model with OpenSUSE.
I do agree it would be better to have native wireless drivers for Linux provided by manufacturers. Currently if I recall correctly Linksys is the only one that officially supports Linux.
Member since:2006-08-01
Member since:2006-03-12
You are boldly wrong, Ralink supports open source drivers via assisting developers of OpenBSD's drivers as well as providing a GPL licensed Linux driver, that's Ralink, since they produce wireless, while Cisco's Linksys division uses other people's wireless, mostly Broadcom.
Member since:2005-07-06
Intel's wireless chipsets have good official drivers.
http://ipw2100.sourceforge.net/
Member since:2005-07-06
Member since:2005-07-06
It would be really nice to have better native support for wifi cards. But in order for that to happen the manufacturers will have to finally open up the specs. For now Linux just needs to implement a better ndiswrapper config tool.
Thats not actually the problem; alot of the time the driver is actually there and opensource; ipw3945abg is opensourced and merged into kernels as shipped by distributions.
The big problem are the binary blobs (hence the Blob song for OpenBSD) and the binary only user land tool, as with the case of the Intel wireless drivers and the regulartory daemon which must run the background to enforce FCC regulartory requirements.
Member since:
2006-08-01
It would be really nice to have better native support for wifi cards. But in order for that to happen the manufacturers will have to finally open up the specs. For now Linux just needs to implement a better ndiswrapper config tool.