The Battle for Wireless Network Drivers

An anonymous reader points out this Jem Matzan article "about the pain Linux and BSD programmers have in trying to obtain/write device drivers for various wireless cards," writing: This article also has a fairly detailed explanation of how wireless firmwares and drivers work. Two of the manufacturers are actively working with the FOSS community without requiring an NDA."

Just one bit of advice

[Anonymous Coward]

I was trying to get an [unnamed] card working.
I spent days looking for drivers for this card.
There were many comments negative about this card
and it's drivers. I was mostly attempting to use
"ndiswrapper" with a variety of versions of drivers
for this card and chipsets.

Hint: Turn OFF the security on the network.
Test just the card. Not the boneheaded typo in the pass-phrase.

Re:Who's afraid of NDAs?

[d_jedi]

So then don't open source it. nVidia does that for their drivers.

So, it's really a case not of these companies not cooperating to allow drivers to be written, it's these companies not cooperating in a manner that suits the OSS software writers - which is a bit different.

Suggested Solution

[pembo13]

Openly promote hardware companies that have fully functioning PCI, PCMCIA, and USB wifi cards in Linux. I will gladly spend my money with them regardless of wether I'm purchasing the hardware for myself or a friend, or for a Windows machine or a Linux machine. In the same way that HP printers almost always "just work" and Creative sounds almost always "just work", and I seek those brands out... I am willing to, and would do the same for other types of hardware. Of course for now, my purchasing quantities are quite small. But who's to say that they won't grow at some later point.

Re:The good list

[Arker]

You can still decide not to buy the laptop that won't work, in favour of the one that will.

Re:As someone that has been there

[jridley]

If it wasn't for the 5-year warranty, I'd be looking elsewhere.

I decided to start ignoring the warranty on drives.

I mean honestly, if I have a drive fail, the LAST thing I'm worried about is whether I'll get my pissin' $70 back for a 250G drive. I want my DATA not a few bucks.

I recently had my first real, hard, unpredicted (no SMART warnings) failure EVER out of dozens of drives from every manufacturer, and it was a 4 month old Seagate SATA drive. HP sent me a replacement, I put it in last night, and after 4 hours use the SMART data reads 4 hours spin time and 54 hardware ECC hits. I have 5 year old Maxtors (with 1 year warranties) that don't have 54 ECC hits.

I don't care if they have a 100 year warranty; I don't care if they're giving them away for free; I'm not going to use drives I can't trust.

I'm not buying any more Seagate for a while. Maxtor either since Seagate bought them. I think I'll buy WD for a while; I just picked up 2 of them and they're spinning nicely and behaving.

Re:As someone that has been there

[kimvette]

How the heck is the reporting from S.M.A.R.T,, an open standard, proprietary? You should present that question to them.

802.11 is a standard

[DaMattster]

The arguments that Intel, Marvell, and Broadcomm make are very weak indeed. After all, 802.11 is a standard so the big 3 must ensure interoperatibility with other 802.11 products so the firmware really isn't really Intellectual Property per se. I cannot see how Intel, Marvell, or Broadcomm could loose by supporting the BSDs and Linux. If anything, it stands to reason that by opening their products to more platforms, they reach a broader audience thereby increasing sales potential. This is only speculation, but I wonder if Microsoft has some hand in this. This may just be another angle of attack in Microsoft's bid to slow adoption of open source operating systems. With the ever increasing use of wireless networks, it stands to reason that if an operating system lacks good support for wireless networking capability it will not be considered for use. Maybe I am a conspiracy theorist, but this one does not seem to far fetched. After all, Microsoft had a hand in killing Netscape. Just something to think about.

Re:What bullocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

"I've had no problems getting wireless to work on my Mac."

wtf. Go buy 10 different USB wireless cards. Maybe 2 will have a driver for OSX. I have a pile of them here that don't work on my MacBook. You got lucky.

Re:As someone that has been there

[Anonymous Coward]

Also have to post AC for this.

I agree that open source is the way to go, and there is and has been a large OSS movement within Intel for years. Intel employs some of the best and brightest within the OSS community and makes a point of going after this type of talent.

You obviously don't understand the legal implications of the FCC requirements for radio devices. EVERYONE wants to get rid of the binary blobs. NO ONE can do it without a possible violation of the slightly vague requirements the FCC puts out to control frequency and transmission power. Interpret them how you will - it's not intellectual property but a possible lawsuit, fine, and recall that the legal teams are trying to prevent.

You will see a 'true' open source wireless driver from Intel when the FCC either restates its policies and rules or the FCC goes away. Is this all over reaction? Probably. Is it good for the share holders if the legal teams play defense over government requirements? Of course.

If you really worked for Intel, and you were not an attorney, your "pushing really hard" was about as useful as one man trying to move a cathedral one brick at a time.

Re:What about Intel?

[mrchaotica]

However on a PC which has an integrated ethernet like Marvell Yukon or so, there is plenty of choice; plug in an ethernet expansion card or wireless adapter that DOES work, and you can still do what you wanted to do, even if you spent $4.50 extra on the motherboard for the privilege of said chipset in the first place.

I don't know about you, but I sure don't want a stupid dongle or PC-Card sticking out the side of my laptop, if I've got an otherwise-perfectly-good internal wireless chip!