[ltp] Wireless PCMCIA cards?

Tino Keitel linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Wed, 24 Nov 2004 10:57:19 +0100


On Mon, Nov 22, 2004 at 10:37:23 -0500, morpheus wrote:

[...]

> Posted by Dax Kelson on September 5, 2004:

[...]

> > The big drawback to the Atheros wifi, is that it taints the kernel
> > rending it unsupportable. The driver will never become part of the
> > official kernel tree due to the closed source pieces. You will always
> > have to go get the driver separately and compile it yourself. There is
> > no guarantee you'll be able to use this card in the future.
> 
> Dax, can you comment?

At least SuSE ships with a preinstalled madwifi driver. However, the
notes regarding the inclusion of the Atheros driver into the kernel are
right. Atheros ensures the compliance with radio regulations by
providing a binary only HAL for hardware without builtin limitations.

However, there seems to be some effort to create a reverse engineered
HAL to replace the original binary only HAL. See
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/4118 for some details.

Regards,
Tino