NDIS Wrapper For Wireless LAN Cards Under GPL 222
An anonymous reader writes " Shortly after Linuxant has released their commercial
DriverLoader, Pontus Fuchs
has made an NDIS wrapper available under the GPL.
Since some vendors refuse to release specifications or even a binary Linux-driver for
their Wireless LAN cards he has decided to
solve it himself by making a kernel module that can load Microsoft-Windows NDIS drivers.
ndiswrapper
has been tested with some BroadCom miniPCI cards and it seems to work on some laptops . With some more work it
should be possible to support more cards. Hopefully this will be the case for
the many owners of Linux laptops based on Intel's Centrino technology.
Please contact Pontus if you are interested in helping out!"
Sweet! (Score:2, Interesting)
Support supported cards (Score:4, Interesting)
Wrapper should send e-mail to hardware vendor (Score:5, Interesting)
Cross Platform Drivers (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone have any thoughts on why this would or wouldn't work?
This is not necessarily good news (Score:5, Interesting)
Bad news : Nobody will bother to write Linux drivers soon enough, they'll all say "why bother, we'll just make a Windows driver and tell people to use the wrapper.
Net results
- This makes card vendors inclined to think only the Windows platform is truly important
- This allows Microsoft to have the option of one day changing, subtly messing up or adding undocumented calls to their API, slowly leaving Linux people in the cold as all card vendors transition.
- I would think native drivers are faster / more efficient / more full featured than drivers running under emulation. That might not be the case though, but more often than not, running alien binaries in any OS isn't known to be as fast as the real McCoy.
Licensing issues (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is not necessarily good news (Score:5, Interesting)
This is already happening. The excellent 3COM 990 series (the network cards with a RISC CPU and memory on the card), for example, have their own firmware and API that hugely simplified writing a wrapper for Linux, to the point that there isn't a real driver. While the wrapper-drivers work, you don't get the benefits of CPU offloading and profiling that you get under Windows 2000.
Regards,
--
*Art
one bad thing (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't want to run a beta version of Linux, so is there any good reason for this?
Re:The reason that this is required: Interference (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a matter of opinion that "restricting people's control over the hardware" is necessary or appropriate. If there is some compelling state interest, then it should be considered a defective and/or dangerous product, which ought to be dispensable only to licensed purchasers.
Treating it as a problem that the consumer owns does not solve the problem. Just because the manufacturer hasn't enabled the consumer to alter the card's programming, doesn't change the fact that the dangerous device has been distributed into the wild.
As soon as some independent party (not subject to the US law-by-agency-order), creates software to unlock these cards, the disabled-by-obscurity features will be open. If that's a problem for the state, then they should have considered it before allowing the product to be sold.
If some product can be converted to a weapon, the fact is, the weapon is in the consumer's hands whether you've told him how to convert it or not. You hold some of the responsibility for this product getting into the consumer's hands.
Re:Support supported cards (Score:2, Interesting)
Does anyone remember... (Score:1, Interesting)
Creative Labs stuff is everywhere today. Where is AddLib?
Come on people, many factors determine success or failure for any given technoloy. The more people using this stuff in Linux, more pressure to the vendor to release native drivers.
In the meantime, another choice is given to Linux users. Isn't it all about choice? "Choice!", this is the mantra, am I missing something?
Re:The reason that this is required: Interference (Score:4, Interesting)