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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."
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on ho
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Proprietary hardware - laptops. Proprietary drivers fro WiFi that lock you to Windoze. And a proprietary Intel Centrino doublespeak.
Is this what poor third-world countries yearn for? Should they leapfrog to disaster? I'm disappointed someone like Mr.Kofi Annan suggested this stuff to poor nations.
-
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
Am I the only one who's first thought was whether these noble hackers would be unfailrly targeted by the corporations using DCMA?
All you touch and all you see is all your life will ever be
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
Nuf said... -Dave
Thanks.
I don't want to put the heroic work of these folks into a bad light, but from an evolutionary perspective, wouldn't it be better to avoid buying hardware if the vendor refuses to support Linux?
....the slashdot editorial team's ability to produce a massive run-on sentence speaks volumes to their journalistic integrity...
I lost my concept of community when my community lost all concept of me.
Only reason I'm asking is that the salesdrone at OfficeDepot didn't know what the integrated wireless on the Averatec 3150P was based on yesterday, and I'm not keen on paying an extra hundred bucks for the feature if it won't work in my OS of choice. Then again, I could save myself the dough and get the model w/o the integrated 802.11b, but still...
hang brain.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10595
US government "shafting working Americans"
CAFTA bill could lose jobs at home
By INQUIRER staff: Monday 21 July 2003, 11:51
A REPORT FROM ginger group ZaZona claims that a practically unnoticed agreement that will endorse free trade agreements with Singapore and Chile is the thin end of what could turn into an "Armageddon" for US workers.
According to the newsletter ZaZona distributes, the CAFTA agreements currently under discussion in Congress, with Chile and Singapore, mean that a "W" visa will allow nearly 7,000 people from these countries to work in the US indefinitely.
But, Zazonaeditor Rob Sanchez claims, in addition to the 5,400 visas Singapore will get under the deal, it will be able to send "unlimited" numbers of workers to the US.
The free trade agreement means that US employers no longer have to prove that jobs cannot be performed by an American citizen.
According to ZaZona, George W. Bush says on his web site that Singapore is working on free trade agreements with Japan, Canada, Australia, Mexico and India.
The editor of the newsletter claims that means Singapore will act like a virtual black hole, and its "immense gravity will pull people into a wormhole that ends at the United States".
He adds: "Bush is celebrating 'Christmas in July' by giving a huge present to his inner circle of power brokers and CEOs while shafting working Americans".
Sanchez told the INQUIRER that the whole problem is not being fairly discussed in the United States press.
He says that Dianne Feinstein, the doyenne of the sound bite, has hit out against the proposed free trade agreements on her web site, but, unusually, she's getting little press on the matter.
He added: "It appears that US politicians have decided not to discuss these two FTAs in public. They don't want the public to find out until it is approved. One day the American public will wake up and realize they have been hoodwinked - but they won't be able to change it".
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.
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-posted by GNAA member Penisbird
The open source development model allows tremendous flexibility, allowing members of a development team to be dropped or added at a moment's notice. With the source readily available and GPLed, one can become familiar with a project's code and CC before applying to be given access to the CVS or equivalent repository. Gradual accretion may produce code in a style not unlike that of James A. A. Joyce's Ulysses manuscripts, but, like James A. A. Joyce, all of the core developers can easily jump from point to point in the code and comprehend the necessary sections and the C/PHP/Python/Java equivalent of their allusions. Unfortunately, as a result of this decentralised development system, commercial QA, support and RHQ are not as readily available. I'm a middle manager and my company has had a double-sided experience with the MySQL AB organization. They produce a fine product which is perfect for a medium sized corporation such as the one I work for (which shall remain nameless). MySQL worked very well for us, but unfortunately at one point we started receiving segmentation faults when there were more than 30 connections or if a query was greater than 2,048 characters in length. We have reported these bugs to MySQL AB but they have not yet fixed them in their latest gamma/production release. However, they have been very polite and are always willing to cooperate with us; even if small portions of the code are not yet fixable and have escaped the relatively poor QA of the EOD, their TOS have always been reasonable and our MD has always been able to CWT regarding the slight problems and BS our way around them.
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
1. Discover your hardware is not supported by Linux
2. Write your own driver
3. ????
4. Still never get laid
The hackers can't be prosecuted under the DCMA, in the United States or anywhere else.
They might have to worry about the DMCA though, because thats an actual law with the correct acronym and everything.
I'm terribly sorry, I forgot to give you the link to Google... it's.
http://www.google.com/
Now, you make sure you put the slashes in the right way ok?
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
So what happened OSS (free and not free) and ALSA happened. Bunch of people go together and said "To hell with the manufacturers not helping us, we'll make it work anyways". It was with this pressure that companies like "Aureal" (who about 3 months after releasing their first linux driver went under) to release drivers. Now you see sound support almost everywhere with linux and it's uncommom to not have sound. Another example of course would be "winmodems", modems actually designed to only run in windows running just fine in linux. It's always just a matter of time.
The community is strong, but you'll see real grassroots efforts take shape especially when developers are told "no". Wireless AP/Routers are in the sub $60 range and you can get a wireless card for around $20, it's now not just a rich kid toy, but a common mans networking solution. Expect more things to come of wireless support and expect that companies will take notice. Too bad it's not that easy to just start writing kernel mods for hardware support. There's a reason only a select few hack the kernel (it's really not easy), and well if you ever run into a developer, thank them, they put a whole lot of work into something and don't always get the credit they deserve.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I haven't purchased a Wi-Fi card. Wi-Fi is a great idea, but frankly to me it is only a stop gap measure. What I am waiting for, and will probably continue to wait for, is software driven radio. It's all well and good to have linux support for existing technology, but frankly I'd like something to come out on linux or a BSD that has to have windows drivers created, rather then vica-versa, something so bold, inventive, and paradigm shifting that it can't be ignored. To me, the GNU radio project looks like a good candidate.
http://www.santacruzbynight.com/index.shtml Santa Cruz By Night Vampire Larp
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
about the time that the HURD is ready.
Another alpha-quality product from the religous nuts at the FSF.
They have already pleased the cult leader by calling it GNURadio though, so for the mindless drones and lemmings of RMS, it is perfect.
C'est une conséquence normale des sociétés molles de nouveau promettant tout mais ne fournissant rien. Diable est-ce qu'elles comptent si elles réclament qu'elles vont mettent en évidence des modules de gestion de périphérique et puis rien? Ces personnes sont presque aussi mauvaises que des fabricants de winmodem. Pourquoi le matériel a-t-il besoin même de conducteurs? Quel est le problème avec de bons vieux appels mode d'ioctl()?
Je calme en bas d'un peu maintenant. Mais toujours, pourquoi ces compagnies ne produisent-elles pas des modules de gestion de périphérique pour des systèmes d'UNIX? Elles pensant qu'il n'est pas économiquement viable, mais elles sont aller juste perdre le part de marché et sembler mauvaises, en particulier car elles retournent sur ce qui est efficacement un accord avec une grande communauté. Il est senseless et n'atteint aucun objectif. Naturellement un intrus de grain avec d'la certaine heure disponible sur leurs mains va écrire un conducteur pour lui!
Note to M1-ers: a curt but otherwise insightful message is not "Flamebait" or "Troll".
MAKE SURE YOU PAY ATTENTION TO SHOUTING LUNATICS!
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
OK This is off topic - Feel free to moderate accordingly. However you must have a look at this
/.
http://www.unleadedonline.net/msfud
No it isn't a goatse.cx redirect or any form of crap, which is typical of
It is a CD produced my Microsoft (OK. Which could be considered 'crap') that was 'freely distributed' to people, which I took the liberty of uploading so a wider audience of people who would never run into such material, can have a look at the tactics Microsoft are using to 'combat' Linux.
I recently got my hands on a CD that was distributed at a MSDN gold partners meeting (Don't ask how I got it. I just walked in as a joke.) in my city, which was part of a small bag of typical Microsoft sales material - what was unexpected was the fact that this bag contained a CD about the tactics M$ resellers should use in order to undermine Linux.
IT IS APPALING/HALLERIOUS - You must have a look, and/or forward to other parties. We all know marketing is about lies, lies and more damn lies, but the tactics and 'facts' described (remember this CD is for 'Microsoft sales representatives' so I guess actual truth needn't exist) are ludicrous and just go to show how desperate M$ are.
Have a surf, laugh, and learn. You'll need a browser with flash 5 compatibility and a decent connection (it is all flash).
I'm stuck with two Linksys cards, the 54g PCMCIA card and a WMP-11 rev 2.7 PCI card, that are both based on the Broadcom chipset. I'd like to help out an existing project on this, but I can't find one anywhere, and I fully expect Hell to call me to tell me to turn the heat back on before I get drivers from Broadcom or Linksys.
Anybody know of any projects out there for the Broadcom chipset?
It is a normal consequence of the soft companies again promising all but not providing anything. Do devil they count if they claim that they go highlight modules of management of peripheral and then nothing? These people are almost as bad as manufacturers of winmodem. Why the material does it need even drivers? Which is the problem with good old men calls mode of ioctl()? I calm in bottom of a little now. But always, why these companies produce don't modules of management of peripheral for systems of UNIX? They thinking that it is not economically viable, but they are to go right to lose leaves it market and to seem bad, in particular because they turn over on what is effectively an agreement with a great community. It is senseless and does not achieve any goal. Naturally an intruder of grain with certain hour available on their hands will write a driver for him! Posted as AC for non-karma-whoring purposes
This is particularly galling when you read about manufactureres who are actually reaping the benfits of open source development in their own products link but then refuse to support linux using customers.
http://www.techsunite.org/news/techind/gao_study1. cfm
July 18, 2003
Reps Smith and Inslee Request GAO Study on Offshore Outsourcing
By David Beckman
WashTech News
___
'We need to know where jobs are
going to be.'
-- Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.).
__
A Washington state congressman requested a federal study yesterday that would attempt to determine to what extent the rising trend of offshore outsourcing is affecting the loss of U.S. tech jobs.
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash) delivered a written request late Thursday morning to General Accounting Office Comptroller General David Walker in Washington, D.C. Smith said in a news release yesterday that he wants the GAO to investigate the impact offshore outsourcing has on U.S. high-tech workers, aerospace engineers, and various levels of state and federal government workers whose jobs have been sent offshore. Fellow Washington state congressman Jay Inslee co-signed the request.
Smith said that in light of the nation's high unemployment rate, the United States needs to develop a new jobs and industrial plan and determine a focus for the "New Economy."
"We need to know where jobs are going to be," said Smith, who represents Washington's 9th District.
While government programs invest in retraining unemployed workers, it is not clear whether there will be jobs for those workers to fill, Smith said.
"Offshore outsourcing (of information technology services) has become increasingly common for U.S. organizations, generally because of the perceived cost savings and to enhance competitiveness in the global economy," Smith said.
But Smith said he is concerned that retraining and educational programs may be training people in the United States for jobs that are being sent overseas.
The recent practice of moving service and development work to countries such as India, Russia, and the Philippines has been employed ever more widely by companies such as Microsoft and Boeing in order to slash domestic labor costs. The magnitude of the effect on domestic jobs and on the U.S. economy has so far not been measured.
___
'Part of the problem with the issue is just tracking and understanding it.'
-- Stan Sorscher, research director for the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA)
___
"Part of the problem with the issue is just tracking and understanding it," says Stan Sorscher, research director for the Society of Professional Engineering Employees in Aerospace (SPEEA). "We're analytical people by nature. Seeing the actual data would be much more helpful in understanding the impact."
The rate of unemployment in Washington state has concerned Smith for some time, said Smith's Communication Director Katharine Lister, especially when constituents complained that offshore outsourcing is responsible for the loss of many of the state's information technology jobs.
"We've been working the GAO (request) for a couple of months now," Lister says. She says the reason Smith assumed a low profile on the issue until now is that the congressman "tends to labor under the radar screen."
Inslee assumed a somewhat higher profile. He met with representatives from SPEEA and the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers, or WashTech, on June 6 in Seattle. The groups asked to meet with Inslee to discuss remarks he reportedly made while on a visit to India. Press reports said Inslee told Indian government and tech industry officials that measures before Congress or state legislatures intended to curb offshore outsourcing "would not go anywhere."
They also asked Inslee to initiate a GAO study on the effects of offshore outsourcing. Inslee said he would investigate making such a request.
Two weeks later, however, Inslee said he was unsure whether he could build support for such a study.
"I'd like to say we could do that, but I don't have a tho
...and wrote drivers for it, we wouldn't have much of a Linux today, now would we?
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
Could it be the bad press that SCO has caused?
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
In what respect is the parent comment Flamebait? My only intention was to explain my motive for reposting some old material.
I prefer this way, as the more code that is GPLed, the better IMHO.
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
...so is tux a biped? does that count?
SIGERR: laziness exceeds quota
Hey, why throw out a $50 NIC when you can get it working by simply investing thousands of dollars' worth of your own time?
My Dell D800 was delivered with an Intel Pro/Wireless 2100 Mini-pci card.
I can't find a driver, so I wondered if anybody knew of efforts to write one.
Another solution would be if somebody could recommend an alternative card for my D800..
Software driven radio. While this sound cool you are getting nowhere without some hardware that will transform analog signals (In cellular with a dynamic range of more than 100 dB (1e10)) to digital. While it might be possible to build such an A/D converter it will use much to much current unless you use some trickery in getting rid of the dynamic range before sampling.
This transformation is what the hardware in modern radios do. This hardware is what is not covered in the gnu project.
What is covered in the gnu project is digital modulator and demodulator at baseband. While this is very nice it is not revolutionary.
If only I could be bothered to do the same with the SiS 650 VGA card I could get DRI working... well maybe!
Basically most work was done by disassembling a linux binary module for the chipset that leaked from one of the manufacturers.
Additionally the behaviour of the card and correct initialisation process was determined by analysing the ARM disassembly of the firmware and watching the traffic that goes between the access point board and its embedded PCcard.
So they have a marketing department? We have a cult. Oops, did I say that out loud? Sorry.
FWIW, there is no MS software on my desktop at home, and I'm proud of that. My wife runs win2k on her laptop because that's what she likes. BFD.
MS bashing (I guess you'd use cygwin to run bash under a MS OS) sure is fun, though!
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I have run into plenty of hardware (and software) that doesn't work correctly in a newer version of windows. It wouldn't be much harder for a company to say "compatible with: ... Linux (2.4.19-2.4.24)." One would know that it would work within those kernals, and it might work with others, but no promises.
McFly777
- - -
"What do people mean when they say the computer went down on them?" -Marilyn Pittman
I didn't see this posted anywhere, but if you read a little more about the topic, you would have found the probable reason for why the manufacturers aren't releasing drivers. It ISN'T some MS scheme to screw linux users. The manufactureres are affraid that releasing drivers will get them in trouble with the US government. Apparantley the card can be reconfigured to transmit on military/police/other "forbidden" frequencies. The manufacturers don't want to have to deal with the repercussions of releasing such a "weapon". Pretty stupid really, considering theres already an effort out there, with some success I hear, at reverse engineering the windoze driver, in order to reconfigure the transmit frequency.
just don't buy another card? Don't support the compagnies who don't support linux!
--
Questions?
Send me a courriel!
Ok, I'm blowing karma on a comment made by an AC, so sue me. :)
A wireless access point consists of a wireless card and some software, providing some features that are really good in a WiFi network. Would it be possible to re-engineer a linux card driver to make it act like an access point? This would be far cheaper that having to buy a proper access point, as well as being more flexible and customisable.
Presently, I've got a Cisco card running under Linux. It's in ad-hoc mode, meaning that I can't use any fancy authentication methods like LEAP. With all the spare cycles in my gateway box, it would be good to put these to use somehow.
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!
1. Get GED
2. Graduate from DeVry with MCSE
3. ????
4. Work at Taco Bell
I tried to post this story about 2 months ago. No dice. Those of us marooned with this chipset had to resort to filing complaints with the BBB in order to get TI to pay attention.
Oh well. Thats the last A) D-Link and B) TI chipset-based product I'll buy. If I buy something that says [b]on the box[/b] that it's supported in Linux, get it home, unwrap it, install it, boot up, and THEN discover it's more like:
This card is supported in Linux!*
* = No.
Bowie J. Poag
Wow. And most in the US see the UN as a large barrier to US policy.
Sleep is for the Weak
A barrier that can be ignored at will, vetoed and accused of being irrelivant if it doesn't do what the US wants? Sure, some barrier...
In a way, this reminds me of CSS vs DeCSS. It started out as an innocent effort by someone to just be able to play the CSS encoded media they had legally bought and paid for ... no theft would have been involved. But, by having created the necessary software, and now it's in source form, others can do with it as they please, and many would please to steal. Had the big media businesses simply made a binary distributed player, that scenario would not have taken place, and maybe CSS might never have been cracked because of the lack of need to do so.
While WiFi hardware isn't the same scenario, there are some similarities. Had the manufacturers produced a binary-only driver module that could be loaded into the Linux kernel (and supported it properly, something essential when you release something in binary-only form), there would be virtually no need for anyone to go create a source form version. Only those wanting to actually hack on the card might. But with the binary drivers not being released, that forces the open source community, which has way more intellectual resources than companies like Texas Instruments, to create their own drivers, and it is open source.
What they feared most, and what motivated their misguided decisions, will now serve to bring about exactly what they did not want, which is hackers reprogramming the cards to operate off-frequency, or use wider channels (maybe I can get 50 Mbps out of this thing while trashing the UHF band of my neighbor's TV), and FCC pressure to make chips without software frequency/modulation agility (and thus increasing the costs due to the need to do hardware programming and design in specific market commitments for each manufacturing production run).
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
" It seems that several manufacturers that were warming up to the Linux community have now reversed positions. "
Could be the developing trend of Linux users to be more accepting of binary drivers.
"Apparantley the card can be reconfigured to transmit on military/police/other "forbidden" frequencies. The manufacturers don't want to have to deal with the repercussions of releasing such a "weapon"."
And how is this "repercussions" any different than the "repercussions" for people always being able to mod the hardware they own.i.e scanners?
There's already laws to cover both this situation, as well as anyone's butt.
This calls for the Open Whore Movement (pronounced "oooowooohmm"), where registered geek girls volunteer to lay with one (or more) male geek engineer(s) in need once every few hours.
This will hopefully, and finally, put an end once and for all to the Unlaid Engineers Problem.
The Itex Apollo 3 PCI ADSL chipset. They released binary only drivers for the 2.4.16 kernel: and then went bust. Very frustrating for those of us looking for a cheap PCI based broadband solution.
Iv'e done some preliminary poking around with my copy of the binaries and it seems that ITEx were pretty sloppy with the binaries and left a lot of symbol table in that wasn't needed, thus making reverese engineering via objdump et al pretty easy.
I don't have time to work on this myself, but I'm willing to kick off a sourceforge or savannah project with what I have already - if anyone else is interested.
/usr/games/fortune > ~/.signature
More than likely it was "It would be cool for all these countries to have wireless laptops" with absolutely 0 knowledge on the details of such an idea.
I'm still a little dubious as to the actual value of laptops, much less with wireless support.
Such things are very convenient, and certainly popular in offices, but I'm dubious that desktops don't provide much of the same benefit. Sure, some work may get done on the road, but some not (and the increasing availability of Internet access means that companies can decrease travel and save costs). Some work that might not have gotten done otherwise might get done at home, but honestly, most folks don't want to go home and then work more, and I think that most don't actually do that much at home (as an addition to work at work, not as a replacement). You can carry laptops to meetings, but honestly, about half the people where I work just use a notepad (partly because quick sketches are currently easier on paper). You usually aren't transcribing vast amounts of text, just jotting down names or some points to remember. So most of the benefits of laptops seem to be less big than one would thing.
The downsides are significant. Laptops (with the notable exception of hard drives) tend to be less durable than desktops, and tend to get rougher treatment. This tends towards producing shorter lifespans. Laptops are a major target of theft, especially in the developing countries where they want to deploy these. Laptops are more expensive than desktops to produce, and manufacturers are still making higher profit margins on laptops. Most laptop manufacturers are big name (first world) companies, given the far greater engineering work required to put together a laptop. So it makes it harder to keep the funds spent *in* those developing countries when making purchases.
Wireless networking is cute, but it costs a *lot* to deploy the thing all over as opposed to just the offices and conference rooms where you'd put wired Ethernet. If you just slap it in those two places, wired can be more expensive, but installation of wires can be done by local contractors, which keeps funds in country and produces jobs. Most people that I see doing actual work on their laptops tend to work in either meeting rooms or their offices. Usually, this translates to just meaning that they don't have to plug in a cable. Somewhat convenient, but possibly (especially given security and performance issues) not cost-effective. Wireless is still a bit of a luxury item.
This wireless laptop initiative seems more based around what a laptop *company* would like to see happening than what's best for developing countries, IMHO.
May we never see th
A new model will have to be approved for use again, a expensive and time-consumming process.
By using the same name vendors may get away without doing it.
Doesn't look very legit, though.
In the early days of linux, only Tseng ET-4000 and Trident 8900 were supported by XFree86. Many of the custom clock chips were officially undocumented by the card manufacturers, and could change even while the product name remained the same.
Manufacturers like Matrox and Diamond were initially the most resistant to providing any kind of support for XFree86. As linux hackers reverse engineered and developed their own drivers and discussion board volume increased, Diamond and Matrox began to release their own drivers.
The issue here with Wi-Fi is that the marketing dudes don't expect that Linux users make up a significant fraction of Wi-Fi customers. They have no axe to grind against linux, instead they just don't see the value. The easiest way to convince them otherwise is to build custom drivers and use them. As soon as a large volume of users are visible, you can bet the commercial vendors will begin providing better support, just like with graphics cards in the early '90s.
Until then, Apple Powerbooks make very attractive Unix workstation.
They know what they're doing. They're well aware that it's only a matter of time before someone comes up with a Linux driver. So in the interest of saving cost and still keeping their specs "closed", they let Linux driver developers do all the work for them and keep selling the chips to Linux users. It's a vicious development cycle.
I'm not trying to troll here at all, but why don't companies write drivers for Linux?
And how is this "repercussions" any different than the "repercussions" for people always being able to mod the hardware they own.i.e scanners?
Being able to mod is different from providing someone with the software to mod.
I recently moved into a house with an odd design which made connecting remote computers to the central router difficult using wires. My (iBook) laptop had no problems because it was able to go wireless, so I decided to go with a wireless solution for my Linux desktop. I had no idea what I was getting into.
I figured the easiest solution would be a USB based device, so I looked around and found a table of USB 802.11b driver support under Linux. At first, I went to a local store and bought a device that the table said was supported. I got it home and ugh, it barely worked. Under Linux the driver was awful. To see if it was maybe the card itself I tried it under Windows. It barely worked there, hanging the machine when I tried a throughput test.
So I sent that back and ordered an SMC card which was supposed to have vendor-supplied drivers. I got it home, plugged it in, and tried to install the drivers. No luck. It turns out they were binary-only drivers for specific old RedHat kernels. So I emailed SMC for support. A week later someone got back to me to say that my issue had been escalated. A week after that I got a tar file in the mail. It turns out what I received was simply a forked and slightly modified version of the code on a Sourceforge project. But, surprise, surprise, it didn't work either.
More investigations led me to an alternate driver. Using the mailing list associated with this project, thanks to Joerg Albert I was able to determine that my device has a hardware configuration which is apparently very rare and needs special firmware. Once I got that, after about 3 weeks of effort, I had working 802.11b access under Linux.
At the end of this I'm annoyed with SMC. I am glad that they acknowledge that Linux exists, on the other hand, they were completely useless when it came to actually supporting their product.
In the end I guess I voted well with my dollars, supporting a company that provided minimal efforts to support Linux rather than one that refuses to even admit it exists. But I also provided $$ to a company that is deceptive about their hardware being truly supported under Linux. It was also pretty annoying that to get the thing to work required taking some random firmware file (in the form of a C header file with a massive data array) and randomly trying it to see if it would work.
It's sad when voting with your dollars is like other kinds of voting, where you vote against somebody because they're worse than the person you're voting for.
What's more frightening is that in a month or so I'm scheduled to find a way to get a mini-PCI 802.11b card working for an embedded Linux system running on an ARM processor. If getting a system with a fairly standard connector was this difficult on a desktop machine, I'm dreading trying to get a card with an obscure interface working on non-i386 CPU. Wish me luck.
Funny... I just bought a DLink DWL-650+ yesterday, messed around with the acx100_pci.o source last night and still could not get the damn driver to load on debian 2.4.21-2.686. Could not get any of the binary drivers to load either.
From a time perspective, I'd rather take this card back and be wireless-less. S***** Dlink. Just because I can write or modify a device driver doesn't mean I should. I'll go support a manufacturer that DOES provide specs.
Oh wait... are there any of those left ?
I have in mind to set up a simple wireless network in my home. I don't need speed, but in spending many hours searching for the known-good cards that are listed on the several sites specializing in Linux wireless I've discovered thet the manufacturers and vendors are only dealing in their latest models at the moment - most all of which are 802.11b+ or g and not supported under Linux. The standard geek shopping sites like newegg.com and ajump.com don't have anything in 802.11 for Linux. Sites that specialize in Linux like linuxcentral.com and thinkgeek.com don't, either. Using google or froogle to search for known-good chipsets or older card models has been fruitless. Rarely in America is it so hard to shop!
Finally I ordered a TRENDnet TEW-303PI from Tigerdirect.com because Tiger's site said it supported Linux (although it's a + card) - but it looks like that was Tigerdirect overpromising, since the box the card's in and TRENDnet's Website don't list Linux support for this card. TRENDnet doesn't tell the chipset either. Anyone know if it's the TI?
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton
Ok, I have this laptop and this smc wifi-card. ,v at the end of the filenames.
This driver gives support in Linux for this smc-card.
Now, the only way I can obtain those drivers-sources, is to boot into linux and retrieve them with cvs. But when in linux, I cannot use the wifi-card and thus cannot get to the internet. The tarball on the sourceforge-site is something funny-looking with
Maybe someone can pull things from cvs and put it into some 'normal' tar-ball?
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
What kinds of tools are out there for taking binary Linux or Windows drivers and turning them into source code?
Of course, a simple assembler/disassembler combo will do and allow simple modifications, but it won't result in anything very readable and would make it hard to adapt a Windows driver to Linux kernel APIs.
Something that goes from binary to structured C code and that has support for program flow analysis and renaming identifiers globally would seem like it would be useful for this sort of thing. Any recommendations?
Does anybody know of linux drivers for ANY card that supports 808.11g?
:wq
Sure it is, when you consider the fact that you already have the equipment. Who does not have a PC mothballed? Also, that PC can give you much better control and flexibility. With a little effort you can have something like kerebos authentication and ssh only connectivity. Can you do that with some dinky little access point?
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Useful, like refilling your printer cartridge? Oh yeah, Lexmark does not think the DMCA is a big blanket law they can use against their competitors and anyone who would do anything useful, do they?
No, people should not be scared, but we should realize that big dumb companies do this kind of thing and we should avoid equipment from them. Think I'm going to buy Lexmark garbage? Not for a long long time. I bought a DLink PCI wireless card and I would not recomend anyone do the same thing. I got encouraged by a pcimcia card working, and figured I should just keep looking. My mistake, I should have taken the piece of shit back right away.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
You're all just modding this down because you can't read French! Ignorant monolingual morons!
The DMCA only covers reverse engineering as it pertains to copyright circumvention. [...] there is a specific clause [] that allows for reverse engineering for the purpose of interoperability.
Which won't stop them from suing - any more than the same clause stopped the RIAA from going after DeCSS (and winning!)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Last Tuesday I bought a new laptop with a PCMCIA wireless card. The wireless card is DWL-650+, and it didn't work on Linux with neither the leaked binary drivers or the in-development OSS driver.
Having some driver development experience, I started reading the sources of the OSS driver, and noticed the amazing work that these guys did in the last months. From a very broken binary driver, they have managed to bring up an almost fully working OSS driver.
However, the PCMCIA DWL-650+ didn't work on Linux until yesterday with the OSS driver - in one of my E-Mail sessions with Andreas, he suggested a small fix to the initialization cn after I compiled and loaded the driver with the fix. It surprised us both completely when this fix got the card actually to work!
Collaboration, people. With only 5 days of having this card which no much hacking experience I have managed to help a few other hundred people out there that might also have this card. The amount of time until an hardware that has no manufactor support will start working on Linux is directly related to amount of people who have this hardware.
So don't be afraid to invest. If the hardware is good on Windows and enough people use it, it will arrive on Linux sooner or later, and your help would be appreciated there.
I followed the FAQ link to d-link's website and found a link to a binary driver. So the claim that no driver exists is a wash. Granted, no source code... but its a non-trival task to decompile the drivers, and definatly inside the realm of possibilities. Am I missing something, or was the original poster, or did d-link sneak in the linkage in responce to a slashdot effect?
It isn't a lie if you belive it.
People who write device drivers for themselves have device drivers and the knowledge of how to do it. They don't have to ask for them again and can contemplate their own devices to do things for them. This puts them in a much better position than the average windoze scmuck who has to buy nev devices that don't always do what they should every two years or so. That advantage translates into money and other things. Even when it does not, the silly Windoze user does not know what to do with himself.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The real solution would be for the open source community to come half way, and the manufacturers to come the other half way and meet in the middle. Rather than rely on tight fisted manufacturers to develop device drivers for in-flux operating systems (e.g. Linux, or other open source variants), why not create a standard for "binary compatible device drivers", involving implemenetation wrappers for BSD, Linux, Windows, etc. Convince the manufacturers to develop _one_ "binary compatible" i386 device driver, and then it will work on Windows, BSD, Linux or whatever your favourite operating system is. This would be the ideal solution because it would also be forwards compatible to future versions of OS and so on. The basis of most drivers (PCI, USB, PCMCIA/PCCARD, etc) is a standard, as is the platform (intel), so why not some standard approach to drivers ?
Linux is such a small part of the overall os installed base, that producing and supporting a linux driver for all of your recent products is not cost effective.
You can't blame D-Link or other manufacturers for selling a product and trying to make a profit which they will use to design, develop new products.
Benspecter cards sold with Linux Driver CD! Capable of up to 54 Mbitte/s
Instead of throwing up "national security" (talk about beating a dead horse), they now claim, "To Protect Military Communications", LOL, to do what? as an exuse to *lock down* future chipsets?
"The fact people are already abusing the technology suggests that they will be forced to go the crypted settings route for next generation hardware anyway."
Is this the future of all next generation hardware? If it's good enough for the military, it's good enough for me as a consumer, I want all available features with gpl drivers to boot!
nt
Yet Mr. Annan claims the right to mandate (yes, mandate) that 'all these countries' get 'wireless laptops', without any concern for the causality involved - someone has to engineer, build and then donate them to the UN. Why not just recommend that the 3rd world countries get 'AIDS medicine' or 'enough food to live on' or 'a decent wage'? It's all groundless pie-in-the-sky, unattached wishing anyway. Here's a suggestion for the Third World:
Stop overbreeding.
Stop killing each other.
Stop stealing from the people who honestly want to help you.
Stop torturing people from the wrong village.
Stop maiming your women.
Maybe then you'll get a little respect, instead of the sneers and half-assed offers of help that you keep begging for.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I'm hard pressed to understand how this information could be staying so restricted. People building embedded devices are not limited to a half dozen or so wireless router companies, there are tens of thousands of engineers out there in everything from large companies to one man shops that must be trying to get this information for hardware projects that would use the TI chips. How is it that this information has not come out yet? Or is it that the Linux developers will not touch it because of concerns over trade secret issues and prefer to reverse engineer it so that TI has no say in the use of the information?
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
I bought two DWL650+ PC cards last april, one for a Win98 laptop (P75) and one for a Linux loptop (P233). After much grief I was told by Dlink that my Win laptop was too old (strike one) and there is no Linux support(strike two)! I had to go to eBay and get a DWL650 for the Win machine (It works). I was quite annoyed about the lack of linux support - what is the point?! How hard can it be? Anyway, I am keen to try out this soln. I hope it works (or that will be strike three for me!)
Are there any 802.11b cards that DO have linux support in them? If so, maybe we should support these guys by buying their products. (wouldn't it be ironic if Microsoft was the only vendor?!)
Linksys has a wireless card out that uses both the Prism2 driver (I don't remember the chipset) and one that has no driver which uses a Broadcom chipset that has no Linux driver. The WMP-11 v2.7 uses the Broadcom one and is totally unsupported. $80 down the drain?
> In any case there is a specific clause in the DMCA
> that allows for reverse engineering for the
> purpose of interoperability.
Warning: non-US citizen asking...
Based on this, could you then buy and mod an XBox, connecting it to your sound system as a media player system? If you have all your e.g. OGG files stored on a regular PC that runs as a file server (as I do), and play them from the modded XBox attached to your sound system, then you would have used the modded XBox solely for interoperability purposes.
I'm on the point of building exactly this setup in Australia now; would it be legal in the US on the basis of this interoperability clause?
Actually, once he's invested his time, once it's
averaged over the 10 of thousands (if not hundreds of thousands) of people who will not have to spend their time writing the code, the card is actually only worth a few micro-cents and the actual value of his time becomes incrediably high.
You may not immediatly undersand, but Karma is like that...
A barrier that can be ignored at will, vetoed and accused of being irrelivant if it doesn't do what the US wants?
Oh, is that why the US is so successful in getting other countries to releave its peacekeeping force in Iraq...
-M5B
The whole point isn't to get them to develop and support the drivers, it's to get specs and code. if they had at least done that i'm sure more people would be working on this project. your drivers don't have secrets to keep people from buying your hardware if they know how they work. after all your buying hardware and simply want to make it work. that's a decent request.
If i was you, you'd be me and we wouldn't be having this conversation
I would hereby like to apologise for inconveniencing you by my mere existence. Arrogant Git!
I'm from a small family (just three kids. I'm 37, it's not unusual for my generation)
I have never murdered anyone in my life.
I have never stolen anything in my life.
I have never tortured anyone in my life. Regardless which damned village they're from.
The first person I find maiming or in any other way hurting any woman will put lie to two of the above. I will personally torture and then kill them. Any man who in any way hurts a woman has, in my eyes at least, given up all rights.
I live in a third world country.
So respectfully, go take a very long walk on a very short pier.
Generalisation is exactly the type of thing that makes Americans damn near universally reviled. Yes, I do realise that is a generalisation, but a mostly justified one seen from the perspective of comments such as yours.
Thank you, sir. Thank you for single-handedly solving all of Africa's problems.
Please remind me to erect a status in your honour.
Part Time Philosopher, Oft Times Romantic, Full Time Unix Geek
I don't like to use the above phrase often, but it's the only way I can describe the Win2k drivers for the WMP-11 PCI. It trashes your routing table, won't run without it's buggy as hell software (which is so slow it can't be native code), and any attempt at circumventing the software through registry manipulation, etc. causes it to stop working until you reinstall it. The card itself seems to be fine though.
Sure it is, when you consider the fact that you already have the equipment. Who does not have a PC mothballed?
I have a PC mothballed, but it's an older PC with ISA slots. Who makes an appropriate WiFi card for ISA?
I have a PC mothballed, but I don't have the power company gift certificates mothballed. An 802.11* access point uses less electric power than a PC.
Will I retire or break 10K?
[No Contents]
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
I don't buy hardware where either the drivers don't exist or the vendor will not provide the specs.
3Com, in it's hay day sold millions of it's Etherlink III cards as you could program it with any OS. Vendors like Broadcomm should take a look at why Prizm blows them away.
ATI could also take a lesson.
I have a PC mothballed, but I don't have the power company gift certificates mothballed. An 802.11* access point uses less electric power than a PC.
You can find 486s with PCI for like $5 if you don't have an old P90 sitting around. People put them in the trash. Better still, you can get a pcmcia enabled laptop for $15 on ebay. My P90 thinkpad with Debian runs OLVWM as well as wifi and ethernet card. Seach ebay for "486 laptop", and find a thinkpad in good shape. Better yet, use the one your company wants to put in the trash because XP won't run on it.
The electricity used by a typical old PC is less than the 150 Watt power supply is rated for. If you have to worry about 100 watts, make sure you turn off all the lights and replace your 250 watt monitor with one of the above mentioned laptops and X into your computers. This is not a concern for most people, much less the corporate market the access point people want to sell to.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
DMCA em and take thier ISP webhosting down! Do it! Do it now!
After making a mistake and buying a linksys card, I have come to realize that there are very few options for PCI 802.11b and linux.
Two cards that are on the compatability list, the Linksys and the D-Link, both have been changed from Prism2/Intersil to Broadcom and TI, respectively.
I think it's neat that someone is working on a TI driver, but that's not really a reason to buy a TI card. And it looks hopeless for Broadcom, so my linksys card was a mistake.
Now, which card to buy? Rumor is, a 3Com card, but geez, that's a >$100.00 card. Maybe Netgear hasn't changed the chipset on MA311's?
If I didn't know better, I'd suspect this was an intentional shutting out of the non-windows world from wireless networking.
Bottom line, I need an 802.11g PCI card, preferably based on Prism2 and guaranteed to work with the linux-wlan driver.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.