[Gllug] London laptop recommendations

[Chris Jones]

Hi

Mike Brodbelt wrote:
> I suspect that the development of iwlwifi by Intel means this won't 

I think it was based on an overly paranoid interpretation of FCC rules
which say that direct control of tuning devices shouldn't be available
to end users.

> It's embarrassing how far Linux is behind OpenBSD in free software 
> wireless support, sadly....

there was a kernel wireless summit a while ago and a key priority was a
standard interface. I'm not sure if mac80211 is exactly that - it seems
to talk about being for soft radio devices only. Maybe all wireless
chipsets do that nowadays anyway. *shrug*

In terms of the factors of why linux wireless is so hotch-potch you guys
were talking about, I think I big one is that early drivers were sparse,
and didn't start abstracting useful things, then the hardware got more
complicated and everyone was doing their own thing and unifying was less
important than fixing bugs. Vendors are often to blame for this kind of
thing (unlike Intel, who seem to get that you need to work as a regular
member of the community, not just dump tarballs on people infrequently.

Complications about IP and competition probably come in here I guess -
Intel are improving things generally, so they're helping linux run
better on AMD's CPUs, nVidia's graphics cards and and any vendor's
wireless cards which also end up using mac80211. That's a pretty big
sell to the people who write the cheques in some places I suspect ;)

Cheers,
-- 
Chris Jones
  cmsj at tenshu.net
   www.tenshu.net
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