The OSS Solution to the Linux Wi-Fi Problem 204
tobs writes "Matt Hartley of MadPenguin.org fame has published an open source way of solving the Linux Wi-Fi problem. He writes, "For intermediate to advanced users, who are willing to track down WiFi cards based on chipsets, live without WPA in some instances or have opted to stick with Ethernet, buying a new notebook for the sake of improved wireless connectivity may seem a little overkill.
When a new user faces problems jumping through the NDISWrapper hoops, tracking down WiFi cards from HCLs and other related activities, the end result is almost always the same — they give up. What so many of us, as Linux users, fail to grasp is that projects like OpenHAL are critical to long-term development. The education on what to expect and what not to expect remains a complete load of hot air when articles claim how easy it is to setup wireless Internet on Linux machines. It's downright misleading."
Atheros (Score:5, Informative)
And any time someone new the *nix asks me about wireless, and why it isn't working, I always insist they spend the $20 on the Atheros chipset, as, again, it is damn near flawless.
There's Still a Problem With Wireless? (Score:4, Informative)
Seriously, I think the article is trying to find a solution in the wrong area. If I want a laptop and I plan to use Linux (which I always do) then I plan to get a wifi card compatible with such. I have no idea how ndiswrapper works and have no plans to ever use it.
My most recent notebook - an HP/Compaq nw9440 - came with the option of a Broadcom or an Intel wireless card. I went with Intel for the simple fact that I know intel works.
Sure enough, wireless was up and running as soon as I installed SUSE 10.2 on the machine. (It initially came with Vista but I upgraded pretty quickly.)
The answer to WiFi is to ensure the manufacturers supply drivers - open source or not - to their chipsets, since they're no longer putting them in the firmware. Intel does. I believe Broadcom is now. Anybody else?
End of story.
Re:What's the REAL Solution though? (Score:5, Informative)
Because wireless hardware is really complicated.
Typically a wireless card is a microcontroller with ROM, RAM, and a CPU --- usually an ARM. One end is plugged into the radio, of which there are a zillion different varieties. The other end is plugged into your computer.
Some wireless cards don't have their software on ROM --- which means that in order to make it work, the first thing you have to do is to upload the software from your PC. This is the infamous 'binary blob' problem. That software is highly proprietry and really, really hard to write. So far (although I could be wrong) there are no open source firmware replacements.
Even once you have the card programmed and running, you still need to talk to it. This usually involves a driver that needs to know how to talk to the wireless card's host hardware (the bit between the microcontroller and your computer), the firmware itself (which may have different command sets for different versions of the firmware), and sometimes you even need to know implementation details of the radio chipset. That's a lot of information you need access to, and it all interacts in rather horrible ways. (Also, FCC regulations may mean that the vendors aren't allowed to give you information that could be used to, say, make the card operate on unauthorised frequencies...)
It also doesn't help that the Linux wireless layer isn't terribly well designed: the abstraction layers are in the wrong place, which means that in order to write a driver you have to duplicate a lot of code. That's one reason why the BSD operating systems typically have better wireless support. Their driver framework makes it a lot easier to write wireless drivers.
The good cards usually have well-designed firmware on ROM with a sufficiently abstract interface that implementation details aren't exposed. They're easy to support, because the vendor can change the implementation without having to change the driver. The bad cards have firmware that's loaded at run time that exposes lots of implementation details that the vendor can't tell you about because the third party whose radio chipset they're using made them sign an NDA. (Or just because they don't want to. Broadcom fits this category.) They require lots of unpleasant reverse engineering.
So, in short, wireless drivers are hard because wireless cards are really complicated.
Re:Scientist's viewpoint (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Atheros names/brands/sources would be nice (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Take the time to buy the right hardware... (Score:4, Informative)
Richard Stallman didn't want a political movement either. He wanted to work around a flaky printer [faifzilla.org]. Unfortunately, reality can be such that a political movement is necessary in order to obtain the things that many of us think should be able to be taken for granted.
Buy Intel (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Buy Intel (Score:3, Informative)
Way worse than Winmodems. (Score:3, Informative)
You only ran into trouble with modems if you started getting internal, PCI card ones. (Okay, and there was that weird Apple external thing, the Geoport. But to their great credit, they never called it a modem.) With Wifi cards, you can be just as screwed regardless of what kind of card -- PCI, PCMCIA, USB -- you choose. Even if you try to buy a particular model, you can still get something that doesn't work because the manufacturer has changed the hardware without any indication on the box.
About the only 'guaranteed' way to get wireless working on a Linux machine is to eschew traditional interface cards and go for something that's an Ethernet-to-Wifi bridge instead (usually called 'game adapters'). Like external modems, these use a standard, well-documented interface for both data and control. But they're expensive and I predict that as more game consoles ship with integrated wireless, they're going to be increasingly hard to find.
Just use Intel (Score:2, Informative)
My laptop purchase algorithm automatically filters out laptops without an Intel wifi adapter (and Intel graphics, but that's another story).
Intel has a solid track record [intellinuxwireless.org] on Linux driver development done right, going back years. They just Get It, while most others don't. My current Thinkpad with a 3945 has worked, with WPA, networkmanager et al with virtually zero problems as soon as Kubuntu was installed.
Atheros' recent AR6K family may become an option in the not distant future, as they finally remove the need for the magic HAL in-kernel blob. However, given my many problems with AR5K-based adapters and Madwifi (kernel crashes galore, lack of in-official-tree drivers), I'm sticking with Intel unless they mess up.
Clarification. (Score:3, Informative)
The Neurophone, (look it up), demonstrated that one could transmit messages via electrical impulse through the skin and have those messages understood by the subconscious. When the subject being programmed is in a dissociative state, (you are in a dissociative state when you watch TV or play a video game), it was demonstrated that one could send instructions to the subconscious through the skin and thereby implant hypnotic suggestions. Subjects would follow these suggestions, believing them to be their own thoughts and ideas. They'd never heard the instructions given to them verbally. They had received them by direct electrical impulse. This isn't science fiction.
The subject in question needs to have been hypnotized before hand and given a series of instructions as to how to interpret the signals which are to be received through electrical impulse. --Sort of like teaching Morse code. When the suitable level of conditioning has been achieved, the subject is brought back into awareness and set into the wild, so to speak. After this point, messages can be delivered to that subject through the skin using the electrical impulses. Apparently, it can be done very rapidly. The subconscious is quite able to understand a quickly changing signal. Then a story can be told; "Bob heads out to the library and takes out a copy of Catcher in the Rye and then buys a bag of turnips and goes home again." Apparently, Bob would go ahead and do exactly this, thinking it was his own idea to perform those actions.
Just wanted to clarify things.
Interestingly, even without hypnotic conditioning, it is entirely possible to alter a target person's emotional state through different types of EM exposure. This in combination with television viewing, (TV's and that hypnotic flicker rate put people under very quickly), opens up a variety of possibilities. There was one item in relation to all of this which I didn't grasp the significance of immediately; the sudden and wide-ranging adoption of the new CFL light bulbs. I thought it was pretty obvious what the intent behind those was; installing everybody's living space with fluorescent lighting creates living environments which are constantly flickering at 120 cycles per second. Uck. --But then the bulbs evolved so that rather than using magnetic ballasts they employed an electronic ballast which served to raise the frequency from one or two hundred cycles per second up into the high thousands, which in combination with the fluorescing coating inside the bulbs appeared to remove any danger of the brain being affected by light flicker. "Hm," I thought, and wondered if perhaps I was just being needlessly paranoid.
Then I ran across an article which talked about the high level of EM radio frequency being emitted from the new bulbs, and another thought struck me. --Until now, incandescent light fixtures were never a noted source of radio frequency EM pollution, but now with this latest generation of CFL's. . .
It's very hard to find stats on what the exact frequencies are which are emitted, or how powerful they are, but I do find it curious that further EM pollution in the radio spectrum should be the result of adopting this new lighting solution. When you know the frequency range, we actually do have enough data in the public realm to work out how it affects the central nervous system.
-FL