wireles

[Arjan van de Ven]

On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 22:01 -0800, Frank S. wrote:
> Sorry to bother you I know  i should ask this questions in a forum but
> i have try with no result so:
> I need to get a wireless wifi PC card for my laptop and a pci wifi
> card for my desktop, I do NOT want to use Ndiswrap or anything similar
> to that I would to get one that works out of the box, PLEASE could you
> recommend me one 
> Thank you very much


the Intel 2100/2200 cards have in-kernel drivers (supported by Intel)
but you need to get some firmware (hopefully that can go into Fedora
proper soon, the license terms are matching with the Fedora requirements
afaiks)

The Intel 3945 cards have an out of tree driver (supported by Intel) and
firmware, and at this point need a binary userspace daemon (but that
will go away in the next months). When that happens the driver can go
into the kernel (together with devicescape or once devicescape gets
merged)

The Broadcom cards have an in-tree, reverse engineered driver but
firmware is a bit of a mess; most work apparently (but it's unlikely
that that will be shipped in fedora, it's more of a "take the windows
driver and copy a part of it" than a "vendor allows us to")

There is madwifi which is always going to be a nightmare (binary kernel
component that is hard to ship by anyone due to it's strange gpl/non-gpl
mix); result is continuous pain of outside, binary driver but little
chance of that changing

There's a whole bunch of others which are smaller in the market, most of
them have GPL drivers but aren't merged yet, several are waiting for
devicescape to get merged first.

So it's not all that bad, as long as you're willing to check before, and
look around for drivers a bit. The good news is that you hardly need
ndiswrapper anymore, and even can avoid binary drivers since most cards
have SOME open driver now.