[Gllug] London laptop recommendations

[Mike Brodbelt]

Chris Jones wrote:
> Hi
> 
> Mike Brodbelt wrote:
>> I believe that's true only for some chipsets, and the Intel drivers for 
>> the most recent wireless chipsets have done away with it.
> 
> I meant the most recent Intel chipset. See
> http://ipw3945.sourceforge.net/ (specifically the Requirements section)

Yeah - that's a driver for the Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG adapter. It 
needs the binary daemon, but Intel are (I think) moving towards 
deprecating that driver in favour of the iwlwifi driver, which will run 
the same chipset without any need for the daemon:-

http://intellinuxwireless.org/index.php?p=iwlwifi

I think the idea is that this will be merged with the mainline kernel 
when it's ready.

> It has been widely suggested that they designed it so the binary daemon
> could be worked around, but I'm not sure if any distributions have been
> brave enough to try it.

I suspect that the development of iwlwifi by Intel means this won't 
happen. Users of the chipset need to live with the daemon or run 
developmental code for now, but the situation should get better soon.

The wikipedia page on free wireless drivers is really handy if you've 
not seen it:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Open_Source_Wireless_Drivers

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

Mike
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