[Gllug] 802.11b/g cards

[Mike Brodbelt]

On Thu, 2004-12-09 at 16:02 +0000, Doug Winter wrote:

> 
> I can however confirm that the madwifi drivers:
> 
>      http://sourceforge.net/projects/madwifi/
> 
> work fine with the netgear Atheros based cards like the WG511T, and that 
> these perform very well indeed.  Although the drivers come straight from 
> CVS it builds and runs easily, even on my 64-bit system.
> 
> there's a closed source bit to the driver though, which is most annoying.

That tallies with my experience. Atheros based cards are the way to go
at the moment for b/g support. As far as the binary only HAL layer goes,
the madwifi project makes the excuse that this is necessary for
regulatory reasons to stop people tuning to bits of licensed spectrum.
Considering that Cisco managed to release an entirely open driver for
their chipset I'm not entirely convinced that their point of view stands
up to scrutiny.

If you can live with 802.11b only I'd go with Cisco Aironet 350 based
cards - all card functions are accessible from entirely open drivers. If
you need support for b/g, then get an Atheros card and suffer the binary
blobs in the madwifi drivers.

Mike.

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