Extra wireless support.

[Dan Williams]

On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 17:26 +0930, Zachary Mitchell, BCIS wrote:
> I am not sure which email message list, and hence which people I
> should send this message to, but I would like additional wireless
> support (an up-to-date driver) included as part of the next release of
> Fedora core.

The policy of Fedora Core is to stay as close to the upstream,
"official" kernel sources as possible (with the exception of stuff like
SELinux).  Therefore, unless the driver for your card is included in the
upstream kernel sources, it is highly unlikely that the driver will be
in Fedora Core.

> I have an example of one driver I would love to see included.  Ithe
> DLink dwl-520 rev.b card.

This uses the linux-wlan-ng driver (or at least, the link from dlink
points there).  I would urge you to push the upstream driver authors for
linux-wlan-ng to submit their driver to the Linux kernel maintainers
(probably Jeff Garzik and the netdev mailing list) for inclusion into
the Linux kernel.  When the kernel gets it, Fedora Core will get it.
 
> There is a Linux driver available here, but installing it requires
> re-compilation of the kernel.

If a driver really requires the kernel source code to compile, it either
needs to fix itself, since its wrong, or it needs to submit the required
changes upstream to the Linux kernel maintainers.  Most sane wireless
drivers (acx100, madwifi, ipw, etc) only require the "kernel-devel"
package, which has the needed headers.  If you actually need the kernel
source, the driver most likely needs to get (a) fixed or (b) upstream.

Dan