Direction of wireless networking in Fedora ( was RE: Wireless update to ifup and network-functions )

Farkas Levente lfarkas at bppiac.hu
Thu Sep 16 16:44:51 UTC 2004


Dan Williams wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-09-16 at 16:23 +0200, Farkas Levente wrote:
> 
>>>Major wireless cards and drivers:
>>>Orinoco (Intersil, Wavelan, Airport, etc)
>>>Cisco Aironet
>>>Atmel
>>>Prism54
>>>Intel 2100/2200
>>
>>may i add Atheros (MADwifi) to this list.
> 
> 
> I was more or less only including in-kernel drivers, of which MADwifi
> isn't one...  But point taken.  Since I work on Fedora, I can't really
> invesigate MADwifi since its not fully Open Source (due to the binary
> HAL and frequency restrictions), and while I understand _why_ its not
> fully OSS, I am really only going to fix/support in-kernel drivers for
> NetworkManager.

in this case it would be _very_ useful to be a "supported hardware" page 
somewhere in the fedora website. so those who buy something can check 
before buy. i agree with you if you complain against ndis-wrapper, since 
it's another story. but those drivers which are not part of the 
mainstream kernel and _can't_ be part because of FCC etc. but it's still 
can be shipped by fedora and can be supported by it's kernel (at leaset 
a separate kernel module), where the "support" means you can help to fix 
problems with it, if you aware of such problems. as linus use to state a 
bad driver is still better than nothing. without this the old problems 
still remains "windows support all kind of hardware, while linux just a 
few ones" and we can't step forward.

-- 
   Levente                               "Si vis pacem para bellum!"





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