[Gllug] Wifi USB that works with Linux & I can buy online

[Peter Grandi]

>>> On Tue, 04 Oct 2005 19:46:36 +0100, Mike Brodbelt
>>> <mike at coruscant.demon.co.uk> said:

[ ... ]

mike> It's worth noting that the madwifi drivers, while native,
mike> are not fully free software, and taint the kernel.

Then essentially all WiFi drivers are not fully free software,
as the chipset firmware is a rule closed source and proprietary,
and must be obtained separately, and without that the card does
not work at all.

The specific issue with the 'madwifi' driver is that part of the
firmware is bodily incorporated into the driver, instead of a
clean separation between driver and firmware as in other WiFi
drivers...

The OpenBSD people IIRC have actually reverse engineered that
bit of the firmware, but it has not been incorporated yet into
the Linux version of the drivers.

mike> Also, in my experience, they don't work at all in ad-hoc
mike> mode, which is a pretty major bug IMO. [ ... ]

Well, it does not look that major to me -- most recent drivers
barely work, never mind in ad-hoc mode (or AP mode) :-).

I'll add a couple of notes though.

-- 
Gllug mailing list  -  Gllug at gllug.org.uk
http://lists.gllug.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/gllug