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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."
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
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?
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
Do you honestly think that Mr. Kofi Annan knows the first thing about WiFi computing with laptops?
People that high up don't think logistics, they think ideas, and let the people below them work out the details. I am sure he wasn't thinking "This is my way to get in the good graces of Bill Gates!!! Third World Countries...Windows 0wnz j00!!!" 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.
The world moves for love. It kneels before it in awe.
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.
...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
The DMCA isn't just a blanket law covering all instances of reverse engineering, regardless of the context. The DMCA covers reverse engineering in cases where it is being used for copyright circumvention, which driver hackers aren't trying to do. MOST Linux drivers have to be written this way. Don't get me wrong, the DMCA is still a pile of hot garbage. I just hate it when people are scared to do ANYTHING that might be useful because of the DMCA.
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.
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.
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!