These days you cannot talk about computers and networks without thinking of Linux and wireless networking. This article explains wireless networking with WLAN, Bluetooth, GPRS, GSM, and IrDA from a Linux perspective. It uses various wireless devices and the corresponding kernel layers and user space tools to demonstrate how they work with Linux. With this knowlege you can tinker with various wireless devices having different form factors, and develop Linux kernel code required to enable unsupported devices.
IBM: Give Linux wireless networking a try
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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So when is IBM going to start offering ThinkPads with Linux pre-installed instead of Windows?
Especially since there is not even a Centrino wireless driver available yet, making the hardware useless.
You should talk to Intel not IBM about that.
Anyways, the drivers are coming soon.
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/02/20/0434207&mode=thread
Wireless on my zaurus is fairly easy to use, but not apple easy. It has come a long way and only needs a few refinements.
Offical drivers are on the way, but I belive Lindows has already devolped some.
A waitress entered my dinner order at my table on a 768×1024 wireless touchscreen tablet X terminal a few weeks ago. I went back a couple of days later and entered my own order right at the table where I was seated by just pointing to the menu. I’d say that wireless networking has arrived. The driver the tablet used was Agere, I think.
I have at least 1 PC for every room in my house – even my XBox runs USB Wireless, and the other machines all have a wireless adapter in addition to one or more ethernet cards, depending on their purpose.
I used the cheapeast atmel-chipset PCI and USB adapters i could find, and these come with Linux driver on the CD, and even have driver source available.
Ethernet cables i find are one of the most annoying to have to snake around the house, and being able to play my MP3 collection from the XBox hooked up to my main video screen and sound system without needing to run a cable from the file server is just awesome.
I’ve also had my trusty Palm IIIxe syncing via IrDA on my laptop, setup a point-to-point IrDA connection between two linux laptops, have a GSM modem (Siemens M20) alerting me of problems at work via SMS, and have a GPRS phone (Ericcson R520) which i used via IrDA on a Linux laptop.
Bluetooth is the one area I havent yet dabbled, as it is of limited usefulness to me right now.
However, with VoIP coming into use in my office, a Bluetooth headset looks like it might be a good option for phone calls.
Wireless is a bit of a chore to get up and running on Linux, mostly because of the difference between cards – some you configure with iwconfig, and others require special setup tools, but I have been extremely happy with the trouble-free operation of my wireless networks which is completely linux except for the Nokia ADSL router.
not any time soon. IBM is in the business of selling stuff, very little market for linux on laptops for them. Besides a good deal of the hardware among the models probably isn’t even supported, or not supported well. Also why would IBM be in any differant situation then any other OEM when it comes to selling laptops with Windows then trying to sell them with an Alt. OS as well. Simply, why would IBM bother with something that maybe 1 percent, on a good day, of the population would want?
IBM works on linux for now because it might sell them some more servers. Personaly I think there is just some people in IBM that have a place in their heart for linux or belive the hype or know there is people they can sell servers to that are on the linux hype. It’s not like IBM didn’t allready have OS’s for servers out there. IBM has probably lost untold millions pumping money into linux. And now they are having fun with SCO over everything, so why not push linux a bit more to make some more noise and flex big blues muscles.
IBM doesn’t even have a desktop version of linux yet, probably never will, or most definitly not something serious for many years to come. IBM knows from their own experiances it doesn’t pay to make your own OS when someone else out there has one all ready made that does a damn good job (talking about windows here). Though if IBM did sit down and get serious with it, they would probably do a good job.
The biggest thing linux does for IBM right now is it makes IBM look good in the eye of IT and geek types out there who used to see them much like a microsoft. Those types love IBM these days, so they sell more product. If IBM truely was interested in a opensource OS to build on they would have taken freebsd and worked with it, no pesky GPL, but that wouldn’t have been as good a PR campaign for them.
Just keep your eyes open when buying your hardware and linux wireless is great. Don’t give your money to companies that don’t care about you.
Eg for 802.11g buy cards based on the prism chips. The company that makes them cares about linux users. They released the info needed to write drivers, and are supporting the development of open source drivers.
Besides a good deal of the hardware among the models probably isn’t even supported, or not supported well
Um exactly. Why would I buy a dell/HP/etc if if I had a doubt that all my h/w is supported.IBM providing a laptop that is 100% compataible would be greatly appreciated by the growing linux user base.
why would IBM bother with something that maybe 1 percent, on a good day, of the population would want?
Seems strange that you should mention that. Linux has a supposedly 3.2% desktop marketshare, while Apple has ~1.8. So are you saying that Apple isnt important?
IBM works on linux for now because it might sell them some more servers.
HP linux Server sales top $2.5 Billion dollars.
http://www.linuxinsider.com/perl/story/32619.html
IBM would be an idiot to pass up on this huge market.
Personaly I think there is just some people in IBM that have a place in their heart for linux or belive the hype or know there is people they can sell servers to that are on the linux hype.
Your right.No other company in the world uses hype to sell a product. *cough .NET/Longhorn/trustworthy computing
IBM has probably lost untold millions pumping money into linux.
Care to elaborate?
And now they are having fun with SCO over everything,
Lol please im begging you, tell me that you belive SCO. That would make my day.
IBM doesn’t even have a desktop version of linux yet, probably never will, or most definitly not something serious for many years to come.
Unless you work @ IBM or have inside information, your only speculating.
MS is going completly OpenSource in 2005. See im specualting too.
IBM knows from their own experiances it doesn’t pay to make your own OS when someone else out there has one all ready made that does a damn good job (talking about windows here).
If MS is doing such a great job, why are entire contries(china, india, etc) migrating away from the windows platform?
The biggest thing linux does for IBM right now is it makes IBM look good in the eye of IT and geek types out there who used to see them much like a microsoft.
I agree.Image is very important for a company. If I knew that the CEO of a major IT company was a convicted Sex offender, Id be more hesitant to do business with that paticular company.
If IBM truely was interested in a opensource OS to build on they would have taken freebsd and worked with it, no pesky GPL….
Well IMO the GPL is the puriest form of opensource. Whats so pesky about it?
IBM is most likely already working on their own version of Linux. Here’s a couple links……….
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,4149,1460599,00.asp
http://www.desktopos.com/sections.php?op=viewarticle&artid=2
Nice trolling!
Ok as I understand it, IBM offers a supported version of linux for every level of its hardware, excluding laptops. This means all there intel desktops and servers, all their midrange boxes and even their mainframes. This is either RedHat, SuSE or both.
Now if they created their own distribution everyone would complain that they are killing the opposition, by colaberation then killing the market. IBM used to do this, then they got hit hard and are very careful now.
Why IBM does not support it on there laptops now, easy it is not IBM but the suppliers of the mobile chips. Mobile video chips, centino etc are not well supported in Linux. IBM does not design or manufacture these devises, the are not responsible for the drivers. Anoy Intel, ATI etc.
IBM has publically outlined the ammount they have spent on linux and linux advertising, from memory over $5Bill (may have it wrong it was an article from last year), they also concider it money well spent. They are growing a market they are in, they gain credibility, they remove reliance on a single external OS provider, all of these make good business sense.
that’s my take on it.
i recently bought a toshiba laptop with centrino chipset in it. had intentions of installing linux on it. was disappointed when I came to knew intel has not rolled out drivers for centrino till now. now that makes my laptop with linux totally useless as I can not connect to wireless(there is this company called linuzant who sells drivers! why should one buy drivers they should come free. i was toying with the idea of getting ornico card phew! and i came to knw about this company which sells drivers for 15 dollars and now my choice is either get card for 80 dollars or drivers for 15!!!!!) what a pity for a linux user(If i had knw how to write driver code my self I would have written it. I am not demanding and not critisizing) but if you dont have basic things like drivers in linux how can it win market share!
There is opensopurce wrapper called NdisWrapper. WLAN Intel centrino works great with it. i have not a single problem.
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/
M.
The worst thing is when a manufacturer decides to revise a card with a different chipset – so you don’t realise that you have bought revision D and whilst A,B,and C all had the same well supported chip, yours has a piece of shite!
Sounds like a happy linksys user
That WPC-211 crap with the version A and version B sucks…
The likelihood of IBM offering linux thinkpads is actually higher than you might think – there are rumours that the UK based offices are attempting to migrate *all* staff to a linux desktop OS for day to day work
I just wanted to state that I’ve just recently gotten a nice new IBM Thinkpad T40p and love every thing about it. It has built in wireless and bluetooth along with all the other standard laptop stuff (pcmcia, apci, etc.) And using MDK 9.2/10 (some updates) with the 2.6.x kernel series I have everything working, even the built in wireless. It doesn’t have a centrino, but meh, whatever. It does have a Pentium M 1.6 ghz and a gig of ram and it works very well.
The built in wireless works just as well as it does in windows, although I did have to download a custom kernel module that wasn’t included with MDK. And before I actually figured that out I also had a wireless pcmcia MS Wireless card that worked fine too. I think Linux and wireless and IBM are a lot closer then everyone thinks.
I think IBM is one company that has always made there hardware compatible with Linux (have also had an A31 and G40 thinkpads as well) even if they didn’t really “mean” to.
*me thinks I should right a review of this laptop for osnews…what do you think?*
I have Wireless(11b) working on my Tower using a device with the orinoco chipset. This is all fine and dandy. I was able to choose exactly the card I purchased.
With Laptops, things are different. In the package there are many components that you have little or no control over. The Laptop maker will go to the market and get the cheapest device thay can to get the functionality they need for Windows. In some cases, this meant that they get devices from people who pay scant recognition to the existance of O/S’s apart from Windows(and sometime only to some versions of that!) or even some (few thankfully) that refuse to even ack that it exists (eg, possibly Broadcomm). So, you end up in a situation with a Laptop that exactly when you can best use a wireless network link, you can’t and have to either, 1) buy another Wireless card, 2) Revert to trailing a LAN cable around with you or 3) switching back to Windows when you want to use it with a Wireless Connection.
The existance of things like ndiswrapper can help but it is restriced to later versions of the Kernel. It has its limitations but it is a step in the right direction.
It will improve over time.
I think IBM is one company that has always made there hardware compatible with Linux (have also had an A31 and G40 thinkpads as well) even if they didn’t really “mean” to.
I think that this is because IBM uses top quality, standard hardware and doesn’t use the cheapest random thing that they can find in their laptops. Their hardware tends to not have acpi that causes IRQ conflicts, nonstandard interface layers, and the other things that I’ve experienced with Compaq/HP/Dell/Gateway laptops in Linux.
Also, on the centrino thing, NDISwrapper works fine for the drivers. However, the internal centrino cards are really awful, if you want to get a great radio I’d reccomend either getting an internal aironet (available with IBM), or an external card with a 180mW+ radio. I get over a mile of range (seriously) with my current setup, though I do use an external blade antenna attached to the back of my laptop’s screen.
I’d be interested in your review, Nick.
“Besides a good deal of the hardware among the models probably isn’t even supported, or not supported well
–Um exactly. Why would I buy a dell/HP/etc if if I had a doubt that all my h/w is supported.IBM providing a laptop that is 100% compataible would be greatly appreciated by the growing linux user base.”
I never said this wouldn’t be a good thing, if there laptops were confirmed to be fully supported that would be great, they don’t need to ship with linux for that though.
“why would IBM bother with something that maybe 1 percent, on a good day, of the population would want?
–Seems strange that you should mention that. Linux has a supposedly 3.2% desktop marketshare, while Apple has ~1.8. So are you saying that Apple isnt important?”
And where are you getting this crack ass statistic? No study worth a dime has shown linux to be over a percent. Hell, just get up and look around in the real world, how many Macs do you see, almost none (depends on where you live though), then how many people do you see using linux? Far closer to none, get out of your geek distortion feild and look at the real world, most people have never heard of linux, next to no one uses it. Just because so many use it in geek/tech orianted web sites does not mean it’s wide spread.
“IBM works on linux for now because it might sell them some more servers.
–HP linux Server sales top $2.5 Billion dollars.
http://www.linuxinsider.com/perl/story/32619.html
IBM would be an idiot to pass up on this huge market.”
so you saying they sold more servers, interesting, where did I hear something about linux might sell more serves, oh yeah, I said that in my first post.
“Personaly I think there is just some people in IBM that have a place in their heart for linux or belive the hype or know there is people they can sell servers to that are on the linux hype.
–Your right.No other company in the world uses hype to sell a product. *cough .NET/Longhorn/trustworthy computing”
whats your point here, you seam to agree but come off as if I was wrong, they are using hype, like anyone else, But you seam to be going with the idea that when IBM does it, it’s not hype.
“IBM has probably lost untold millions pumping money into linux.
–Care to elaborate?”
When you hire people to work on something this cost money, to do pretty much anything will cost money. If you do not make money back from this expenditure you loose money. No where has IBM said they are rolling in the dough from Linux. Furthermore they would not be making money on linux. They would be making it on hardware, thus loosing money on linux, but they can afford this since they make up that loss on hardware.This is were so many linux startups tank, they miss the whole part were you need something to bring in money like hardware. Though you would also have to determine if sales changed by using linux verses one of their in house OS’s.
“And now they are having fun with SCO over everything,
–Lol please im begging you, tell me that you belive SCO. That would make my day.
What is wrong with you, seriously, did you eat lead paint as a kid? IBM is in a lawsuit with SCO, how did you read this as anything else, did I say anything Pro SCO here? It was in a tone of IBM having fun with the case. I never said anything about SCO being right, you are just digging for stuff. For all it’s worth though, I have passed no judgement on this one, this is why we have courts to decide. I’m doubting you work for either of the companies, so you have no way to know one way or the other.
“IBM doesn’t even have a desktop version of linux yet, probably never will, or most definitly not something serious for many years to come.
–Unless you work @ IBM or have inside information, your only speculating.
MS is going completly OpenSource in 2005. See im specualting too.”
Has IBM released a desktop version of linux for sale? Nope they haven’t, therefore I am correct, no inside info needed. The could turn one out tommarow for sale and I would be wrong, but odds are that ain’t gonna happen.
I do know people who work for IBM, they have never even seen linux inside the company, not a IBM version, but simple haven’t seen linux period. IBM used winXP inside a great deal.
“IBM knows from their own experiances it doesn’t pay to make your own OS when someone else out there has one all ready made that does a damn good job (talking about windows here).
–If MS is doing such a great job, why are entire contries(china, india, etc) migrating away from the windows platform?”
Have they done this yet? How many countries still widely use MS software? Why do the majority of computer users use windows just happily. You may not like MS software, but the bulk of the world is very happy with it. And it’s not because there is no choice, it works very well. IBM had OS/2 and let it die since there was no point in it, they sold product with Windows on it just fine.
“The biggest thing linux does for IBM right now is it makes IBM look good in the eye of IT and geek types out there who used to see them much like a microsoft.
–I agree.Image is very important for a company. If I knew that the CEO of a major IT company was a convicted Sex offender, Id be more hesitant to do business with that paticular company.”
Don’t know if you being sarcastic or not. It not, I’m curious why the personal actions of the ceo effect your desicions on the products of the company. If so do you mean to tell me if IBM did everything to be evil in your mind you would still want to buy stuff from them?
“If IBM truely was interested in a opensource OS to build on they would have taken freebsd and worked with it, no pesky GPL….
–Well IMO the GPL is the puriest form of opensource. Whats so pesky about it? ”
well, GPL isn’t the purest form of opensource IMO, the MIT/BSD liscense are since they make the source truely open since you can do whatever you please with them, or much more so. For IBM using freebsd would mean they wouldn’t have to comit anything back, and thus could build a desktop on it that would be their own. All their work on linux gets thrown out the door. Though like above, they can afford this as I mentioned above since they take the loss to sell hardware.
Actually look on either zdnet.com or cnet.com for the linux desktop hitting 3.5% and leaving apple in 3rd place..
thing is no one has really come up with a good way to verify them. Some studys have come up with 3 percent, but the next day one will come out that says less then 1 percent. I take them all with a grain of salt. I don’t think there will ever be very solid numbers. And I think anyone who commits them selves to beliving for certain that linux is that high is a fool. I always go conservitive. To say that linux has more then mac on the desktop is hard to belive. Sure there is the price issue, but price doesn’t really drive most people since their computer comes with an OS, or they don’t mind paying for one. Now maybe in some countries linux is much higher, like developing countries, I could see that. But in the US I will have a hard time beliving any such numbers without a lot of support for them.
Also since my comment was in the text of laptops, those who are going to go out and buy a new laptop probably care less about linux, they have the money to buy something and saving a few bucks on the OS doesn’t matter, and they probably are ones who use their laptop for work and aren’t the type who are into alt OS’s. Also apple has an increasingly growing percentage in the laptop domain. They are much more competitively priced there. So they very well may be closer to 5 percent in laptops. I have no way to back this up, but I think most would agree they have a much bigger presance in laptops then desktops.
when you are getting down to a few percentage points just the error factor can bounce the number between nothing and 3 percent. It’s not like figuring MS market share and you can guess 95% and still be close, be off by 1 percent in the apple and linux market share area that makes a big differance. I doubt there is any true way to figure it out. Thats why I say just look around in the real world. Once you get outside of geek-dom you simple don’t see linux, but you see a mac here and there, so it’s safe to assume more mac usage out there then linux
Hi everyone,
maybe those of you those who owns thinkpads should look at:
http://www-306.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR…
and
http://www-306.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/document.do?lndocid=MIGR…
These links are rather new and poitn to usable drivers for Linux.
One interesting thing also is thaat some thinkpads comes with Atheros chipset and there 2 drivers being developed (one GPL and on containing proprietary code).
http://madwifi.sourceforge.net/
Have fun
Dom
Brad,
If you are so unconfident in the studies of Linux market share, how can you state that it is probably less than 1% due to a study (or a guess pulled from nowhere). And then you criticise and try to undercut claims based off of much more current studies that show it to be above 3%…
You can’t play both sides of the “study game”. It just doesn’t work.
Mark
P.S. I would show up as a Windows user, because I purchaed my PC with Windows on it. I am *not* a Windows user. I repartitioned and put 100% Linux on my machine. So, yes, the studies are not 100% accurate down to the individual machine, but they are *statistically* accurate within the confines they publish as a margin of error.