Slashdot Mirror
Reverse Engineered 802.11b+ Drivers
orv writes "When Andreas Mohr found that his new wireless networking card wasn't supported under Linux rather than returning the card and getting himself a supported one, he decided to set up a project to write his own drivers instead - http://acx100.sourceforge.net.
Companies such as D-Link had initially promised to release linux drivers for these cards but later backed down from that promise and announced that Linux would not be supported and that customers should not hold on to the cards in the hope of getting them working, as shown on their current FAQ.
Texas Instruments, the makers of the chipsets upon which these 802.11b+ cards are based refused to release code or specifications for the cards, no doubt for similar reasons that were recently discussed here.
The fact that the current alpha release is certainly as good, and in some areas better, than the binary drivers that escaped from one of the card manufactureres speaks volumes for the quality and determination of the team to create their own drivers."
It is good to see a direct verifiable example of Open Source development with a higher standard of Quality Assurance than the corporate developers.
A psychological standard of quality on the part of the devs leads to a physical and coding standard of quality a cut above the rest.
An infinite number of monkeys will eventually come up with the complete works of
It seems that several manufacturers that were warming up to the Linux community have now reversed positions. Does anyone have contacts within companies like Dlink, Linksys or Netgear that can tell us why? Will Intel continue to shoot us a bird with the centrino too?
It would be easier to understand if the companies had been a-holes all along. I hate to see the change as it is effecting the buying patterns I had become comfortable with.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
I can see why a company will not want to provide multi-OS support officially, as if Linux changed they don't want the liability of having to support the changes. But, if someone in that company was already half written a driver, even if it is buggy as hell, surely they should give this away to the user community as a starting point rather than forcing people to reverse engineer their own solutions.
Omnis amans amens
It doesnt say on the pages how he reverse engineered it.
It would be nice to have a system which emulates a whole machine (ala vmware but open) and then open some ports from the emolation to the real hardware. This way Windows assumes its running on a real machine but you have full snooping on the interface with the hardware.
It wouldnt take too long to write a simple x86 emulator for KMD. And a nice tool to decide what areas whould be feed straight through to the real hardware would make it much easier to make drivers for other win only devices. It would also be useful to test the linux drivers but you can allready run linux in user mode.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
In any case there is a specific clause in the DMCA that allows for reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
Did anyone notice that D-Link's FAQ now provides a link to the SF project at the bottom? Well, it's better than another asinine lawsuit!