[Phpwm] LGA s/w

[Phil Beynon]

> > This _should_ work.
> > On Windows I have a nice little button that says 'have disk' 
> when it finds
> > some hardware it cant cope with, I can't see why Linux can't have that -
> > because until it does the average "Doris in the office" type user simply
> > wont accept it, regardless of how great it is technically.
> 
> A few problems this:
> Has the hardware maker bothered to make a Linux driver ?

Yup, Its a Ralink chipset and should be the RT73 driver.

> Does the driver work well ?

Right now it doesnt work at all, it comes up with some error message which I dont have to hand right now. Both cards I have, the other is a Realtek are supported and are supposed to work. But the error message they come up with alsmost looks like something is missing from SuSE as far as the drivers are concerned.

> Is a closed source driver going to be harder to support or limit a users
> freedoms ?

With something such as wifi chipsets, there is a core standard functionality, for that to function it makes no difference as to if the driver is open or closed source as for most people its going to be used in 'normal' mode for connection to an access point, authentication methodology etc.
I would right now be happy to get it into this mode just as a starter!
When the card is put into modes such as promiscuous or open monitoring (where it can listen to both sides of a conversation between a network node and access point) for 'non-normal' useage then the driver is inconsequential as it requires seperate software capable of controlling intimate aspects of the chipset which are specific to that make and model of chipset.
Unfortuantely, for reasosn I'm not fully understanding yet, certain modes are being blocked / made unavailable by windows.

> Ubuntu have made some headway with this on there last release with their
> 'Ubuntu Restricted Drivers Manager', see:
> 
> http://www.michaellarabel.com/?k=blog&i=114
> 
> Plus I think that the windows hardware wizard would also confuse 
> alot of users.

The reason i am using OpenSuSE is that it is supposed to do what I want really easily and well........ !
 
> > I didnt mention it decided to lie to me and say it would 
> happily resize the
> > XP partition down to 40Gb during the install when in actual fact it
> > completely overwrote it, did I!
> 
> Would have been nice if Microsoft had released a spec for ntfs,
> instead the community
> had to spend a few years reverse engineering it. But bugs will still
> happen, the best thing
> you can do is bug report.

Yup!
I'm not pro MS, or today really pro Linux, I'm just pro me getting this box working in the shortest easiet possible period of time so I can try it out then get it on a customer's site and doing its thing! 

 
> Peter

Phil

No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition. 
Version: 7.5.488 / Virus Database: 269.14.1/1050 - Release Date: 04/10/2007 17:03