[Nottingham] WLAN Problems

[Jon Masters]

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Robert Hart wrote:

| On Fri, 2005-05-27 at 21:31 +0100, Rob Andrews wrote:

|>Before you go using the evil that is ndiswrapper, pop on down to

| It may be an evil, but a pretty necessary one.

It's useful, but it's not the optimal solution when it comes to
supporting hardware - in much the same way that Windriver (no that's not
a typo of Wind River for those who've not heard of Windriver et al.) is
a good idea but is no substitute for good native support.

| I'm normally pretty sceptical about binary drivers/hacks like this, but
| I have found that ndiswrapper actually does work, whereas the existing
| linux drivers (probably languishing on some sourceforge project with two
| developers, only one of which knows the difference between C code and a
| shell script) are completely unusable.

I think that's a little unfair. Let's take a look... 8 developers and a
3 man QA team with sponsors that suggest a clueful team of people. I
don't recognise any of these guys as core Linux kernel hackers but I
think the community is more than 2 guys on SF (it's not even SF).

Let's give these guys a break. They look pretty clueful but are lacking
in support from vendors who like to abuse National Security and FCC
regulations as ways to withhold device information (but don't let me get
started on US witchhunts...).

Supporting some devices is simply a case of adding new USB dev IDs (see
recent Greg K-H's blog entries for funny examples of this process at
http://www.kroah.com/log/ ) but others require a lot of magic. I know
this because I've done some device driver hacking myself and in that
case have all the datasheets and still have some problems. It's hard. If
it were easy then all hardware would just work :-)

</rant>

Jon.
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