[Sderby] Linksys 54G cards - was [Northants] Wireless PCMCIA Cards

[Ashley Heath]

Begin forwarded message:

Date: Sun, 14 Dec 2003 17:12:01 +0000
From: MJ Ray <mjr at dsl.pipex.com>
To: northants at mailman.lug.org.uk
Subject: Re: [Northants] Wireless PCMCIA Cards


On 2003-12-13 11:10:01 +0000 David Jolley <dave at lucien.cx> wrote:

> The Linuxant drivers are spectacularly good, as long as you don't 
> mind some 
> closed source software on your machine.  Me, I fall on the pargmatist 
> side of 
> the argument, I want my hardware to just *work* :)

Me, I'm a pragmatist, but I come out with a different conclusion. I'm 
not sure that I've ever had a closed-source driver that has worked 
correctly over a long time (including kernel upgrades) and my main 
complaint against them is that I can neither fix them nor have them 
fixed. It has also been harder to debug things with them around. I'm 
sick of wasting my time on crappy code and now I buy stuff with free 
software drivers whenever possible.

For your case (Linksys), the Linuxant part seems unnecessary. I've 
been told of http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ which looks like it 
loads the LinkSys closed driver part. (Someone was asking ALUG main 
list about laptop support.) Not a substitute for a real driver, but 
maybe a useful stepping stone.

http://madwifiwiki.thewebhost.de/wiki/ looks useful too. Atheros a/b/g 
drivers, apparently free software and partly from NetBSD. So there is 
g for Linux now, albeit "little tested".

-- 
MJR/slef     My Opinion Only and possibly not of any group I know.
Please http://remember.to/edit_messages on lists to be sure I read
http://mjr.towers.org.uk/ gopher://g.towers.org.uk/ slef at jabber.at
  Creative copyleft computing services via http://www.ttllp.co.uk/

------------------------------ SNIP  ---------------------------------

Me, I had to look up pragmatist ;-)
Looks like Mr Jolley has started something on the Northants list, but for those not on the list there is an interesting link to an open source ndis wrapper that is supposed to work with the new 54G linksys cards, plus a few others. May be worth a try before you splash out on driverloader.

http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/

Ash