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Lucent did OEM their electronics, but also had a microelectronics division that spun off into Agere (http://www.agere.com./ During the downfall over the past several years, the modem business was one of many that Lucent exited.

Western Electric already exists - it's called Agere Systems.

I can actually say that I live near one of the companies that headed this project. Amazing what our little rural Pa. town can do from time to time (too bad about Agere Systems, though.)

Just hope they build one here eventually! :)

I was so stoked when I read this, I called HP to buy one. I just wanted some confirmation first.

I spoke with Lorraine in tech support, and she was very helpful, but she confirmed:

• 802.11 a/b/g card will NOT work from the factory under Suse
• Optional Bluetooth will NOT work from the factory under Suse
• Hibernate/etc will NOT work from the factory under Suse

She said these exact words to me:

"You Linux people always seem to be able to write your own drivers, so maybe you can get it to work that way."

I have the Dell card you speak of, and I used the Agere driver for WPA support with it.

Works fine and I didn't have to do anything special.

This will be a binary only release, pretty much hands down, pretty much precluding the more esoteric and non US centric distros getting a driverset. Still the big deal for me isn't distro, OS lockin because of drivers is no news to me.

I sit here typing this on my Presario X1000 which would not agree to function with the DriverLoader hack. The only way I'll be able to get reliable support for mini-PCI wifi will be to replace the intel card with something like this.

Hell I'm not even worried about the wifi drivers until I can actually get decent battery life. Maybe if the speedstepping was 100% complete and verfied by an intel OSS coder then I'd take this to heart. Until then, this is just more of the same empty promises Linux drivers are "under development" and have been for nearly a year for the wifi, from intel's page anyways.

They are actually being updated by Lucent/Agere: the basic version of the binary module keeps changing (the last version was updated to include GCC3 support). I'm rather hoping they're going to include support for their AMR modems soon, since the current version doesn't support them...

Actually, most Win98 drivers won't work on WinXP - due to the fact that they're completely different kernels. Some drivers (written to the 'Windows Driver Model', an encapsulation of the Win2K driver interface) will work on both OSes, but I've seen precious few. Most Win2K drivers will work though, excepting Creative Labs products.

And FYI, there is a Lucent/Agere driver for WinXP included in the base OS (and a newer one available from Agere themselves); they're not giving up support yet. For those of us with Lucent kit, we can only hope...

I can say from experience that a line-rate OC-12 ACL list is quite feasable, and in fact OC-48 (2.4Gbps) is quite feasable with today's technology.

Some of the new Network Processors are absolutely astounding in terms of what they can accomplish. Take for example the Agere network processor. It has no problems doing ACL at OC-48. Or the Sibyte network processor, with dual 1GHz MIPS cores running Linux, which should be more than fast enough to handle OC-12.