Wireless cards

[Ian Malone]

Mike McCarty <mike.mccarty at sbcglobal.net> wrote:

 > John Summerfied wrote:


 >> Justin Willmert wrote:

 >>> Try http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/. It provides a kernel module
 >>> so you can load windows drivers. It's how I got my wireless lan card
 >>> to work.

 >>
 >> Please, don't buy a card based on its working with ndiswrapper.
 >> Instead, reward those vendors who help us by providing or helping
 >> with Linux support.
 >>
 >> A Windows driver could potentially do Bad Things to your system.
 >>

 > A Linux driver could potentially do Bad Things to your system. So?
 > IMO, the fewer fingers in the pie, generally, the better. Making
 > drivers from one OS try to run on another does not sound like a good
 > idea to me. Whether they be Windows or Linux or whatever is
 > irrelevant.

That's the basic point.  There are manufacturers who support Linux,
if you run Linux why not consider supporting them?  A manufacturer
who does not support Linux is not going to care at all if you
can't use ndis wrapper, and the ndis people may not be able to fix
it however hard they try.

 >> What do you do if the Windows driver's broken? What do you suppose
 >> the vendor will do? Laugh?
 >>

 > In my experience, they fix it, and offer upgrades by free download
 > from their web pages. What happens if a Linux driver is broken?
 > "Well, you have the source. Fix it yourself!"

This has not been my experience.  Developers are often happy to fix
something if you can provide good information on the problem.  I
think ndis is worthwhile, because there are people who have little
choice about their wireless card, but if you have a choice surely
buying something that's going to be supported is a better idea?
An open source driver is well protected against things likely to
break it (like the change to 4k stacks FC2 made), a closed source
driver requires commitment from the manufacturer to what amounts
to a small fraction of their sales.

While on the subject, I should give a mention to normal network
cards.  I've very rarely seen problems with drivers for these
since I first tried Mandrake in 2000.  I'm guessing the reason
is the interfaces are well known so the OS drivers can be easily
maintained, there's no reason this can't be the same for wireless
NICs if we give manufacturers an incentive.

-- 
imalone