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uh what? ralink drivers are supported both in the Linux kernel and by ralink themselves. Did you even bother checking the wireless chip manufacturer's website?

I just built a mini-itx machine using a Medialink USB wireless ethernet stick which lsdev showed as a Ralink chip. Both the rt73usb driver in the kernel and the rt73 driver from ralink work perfectly.

Five years ago, you were right. Not anymore.

SiGe is killing GaAs.

Many of the devices communicating in the higher frequences of the microwave range are based on Silicon Germanium. This includes cell phones.

Almost ALL WiFi radios are SiGe [PDF warning]. Some have even moved to RFCMOS.

Most GPS devices are SiGe.

Oh, and TV Tuners, too.

Gallium Arsenide *is* exotic, because it has to be done in specialized fabs, not those that run silicon wafers. That significantly drives up the cost vs. SiGe and RFCMOS.

Bottom line is: I would not buy Atheros-based cards, and rather go for RaLink or ZyDas.

According to the article, there are three companies that have actually worked with the free software community on drivers. Here is the list:

Ralink Technology

Atmel Corporation

Realtek Linux drivers here

Vote with your money, folks. If you would like to see companies cooperate with the free software community, reward the companies that do so by buying their products.

If you know of a particular piece of WiFi hardware that works particularly well in Linux or BSD, please follow up here so we all know what to buy. (See also this list.)

According to the article, there are three companies that have actually worked with the free software community on drivers. Here is the list:

Ralink Technology

Atmel Corporation

Realtek Linux drivers here

Vote with your money, folks. If you would like to see companies cooperate with the free software community, reward the companies that do so by buying their products.

If you know of a particular piece of WiFi hardware that works particularly well in Linux or BSD, please follow up here so we all know what to buy. (See also this list.)

steveha

On the end of the spectrum we'd like to be on, several competing vendors would warranty the merchandise as being compatable with linux, and would provide source-code compatable drivers (for kernel independence). We're at the extreme far other end of that spectrum, as far as I can tell.

Ralink provides source code. Of course, they don't make actual cards, but my point is that we're not so far down the spectrum as you claim.

Saying that "Linux" doesn't support your ra2500 is a bit misleading. RaLink itself has provided GPL drivers. As long as it isn't in the kernel yet, it't up to the distribution to included it. For instance, Ubuntu 6.06 includes the drivers and my ra2400 worked fine with it, while Slackware 10.2 doesn't.

> Also if you ever want a RALink driver, OpenBSD is the only OS that has one right now and it seems almost certain any ports will be based off it.

I thought RALink supported Linux themselves, otherwise, what's this?

That's just crap. Linux has had ralink drivers for a long time already:

http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page

A word of warning, might save someone a day or two:

The RaLink-based wireless devices are becoming increasingly popular due to the parent's assertions (which I agree with).

I bought an Edimax EW-7128g from http://www.openforeveryone.co.uk/ as I was assured Linux compatibility. I followed the excellent Gentoo wiki rtx00 HOWTO the instructions of which are geared towards that specific Edimax card.

It is common knowledge that this card has the rt2500 chipset, however the two cards I received have the RT61 chip (from RaLink also). You can get this driver from Ralink.

Minutes after downloading that driver I had the card setup and connected to another machine. I have not used it for long enough to give an idea on its stability however.

Ralink is a company which manufactures the chipsets for dozens of popular 802.11x devices. They do indeed provide drivers (and source) for linux:

http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm

they also provide a nice table, with links to the manufacturers

http://ralink.rapla.net/

AND they have an open source project, as well, to support the drivers!

http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page

check it out. it's cool.

I've presently got a Belkin 54G pci card running, ndiswrapper just works the hardest thing was installing on someone elses windows machine to extract the firmware, I'd rather the firmware that comes with the card or a known manufacturer update. RT2500-Linux-STA-1-4-6-2.tar.gz from http://www.ralinktech.com/ its gpl and has a nice qt3 utility for configuration, etc.

I purchased a Belkin Wireless G USB Adapter, the drivers for this device were at this location:
http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm
I noticed there were specific linux drivers there. (I only used the OSX drivers which worked perfectly)

I've used ndiswrapper to great success for the Intel PC2100, the LinkSys WPC54G. However, ndiswrapper had problems (probably bad windows drivers, I'm not sure), with the DWL-G122. However, the status reports at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index .php/List#D pointed to native drivers at http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm. Kudos to Ralink for providing working Linux drivers.

I have a Belkin F5D7050UK USB 802.11g adapter, works brilliantly under OS X. I'm using the drivers from http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm

Ralink manufactures chipsets for wireless cards and supplies GPL source code for drivers under Linux. I have an A-Link 802.11g card and it has pretty good support with newer distributions.

I have a Belkin F5D7050($40) working like a charm on Linux with the driver from http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page. I'm also trying to use this on Mac OSX 10.4.2 with the driver from http://www.ralinktech.com/ but it keeps trashing Tiger like a windoze box. It either gives me the beachball of death a few moments after I start downloading something, or a nice grey multilangual thingy telling me I need to restart. Anyone else has this problem or it's back to 10.3.9? No problems there.

http://www.ralinktech.com/

USB wireless dongles using the RT2500 chipset aren't too hard to find, and they do have OSX and Linux (well source anyways) drivers.
http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm

(currently working on interfacing an original iMac to a Primestar dish...)

http://www.ralinktech.com/

USB wireless dongles using the RT2500 chipset aren't too hard to find, and they do have OSX and Linux (well source anyways) drivers.
http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm

(currently working on interfacing an original iMac to a Primestar dish...)

I can't speak for bluetooth, since I never cared for it until about 2 months ago when work upgraded my phone to support it. But as far as:

Those wifi 802.11g dongles are just now in the $20 price range. 8 months ago, they were all over $40. My girlfriend settled on an 802.11b dongle because it was $25. Now the 802.11g ones are cheaper. So yes, prices were higher for longer in the US, and are now starting to come in line more with what you find in the EU.

No! You just weren't searching hard enough. I upgraded almost a year and a half ago to all 802.11g for $23 per card. I live in the states and I bought from http://www.shopampm.com/. Free shipping no less. Since then, the manufacturer of the cards has released many upgraded drivers and this card is fully WPA2 compatible.

Good buy considering that the encore cards on this page are Ralink Chipset AND have linux source drivers availalbe at the manufacturers website.

You know there's an easier way to install undecorated drivers than decorating them yourself. Disable the requirement for decoration in your registry.

But either way so far there's little point for WinXP 64. No real apps yet and only a few wireless nic drivers. Yeah and I haven't tried to print yet.

Hehe. Of course if it weren't for the odd game I would even have windows installed. Running a good X86-64 Distro like FC is great. 64Bit Goodness. Now if only I could only get a 64Bit Flash plugin, 64Bit versions of all the Windows...er Mplayer codecs, and hey a 64Bit java plugin would be nice.

Oh anyone looking for a wireless nic with WinXP 64 Drivers should look at something using Ralink's RT2500 chip. They have a 64Bit driver on their website.

http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm

Yes, Ralink provides Free (as in GPL) Linux drivers for their rt2400/rt2500 cards here. My roommate has a laptop with an rt2500 wifi card, and it works beautifully in Linux.

Already done. Ralink already offer Linux drivers for their 802.11 chipsets from their official website. The last time I looked, these used the nVidia/ATI-style 'closed binary blob plus glue code' approach for their drivers, but that doesn't seem to be the case any longer.

ASUS are even declaring official 'Linux support' on the boxes of their Ralink-based cards. I don't know how good the drivers are yet, let alone the hardware, but at a current retail price of 17GBP in the UK, I might give one a punt shortly.