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LinuxAnt's DriverLoader Loads Centrino Drivers
cRueLio writes "The latest release of Linuxant's DriverLoader can now load Centrino drivers. This is very useful, because Intel has been resisting the release of Linux Centrino drivers. For those of you who don't know, DriverLoader is practically a wrapper for Windows wireless drivers."
What is Intel thinking?
Why would it be in their interest to do so?
Intel should just be happy selling as many chips as possible.
Is Microsoft strong arming Intel yet again?
DriverLoader packages can be downloaded from Linuxant's web site at no cost*.
* Linuxant is happy to provide free trial DriverLoader licenses, while discussions are under way with hardware vendors to finance development costs. Linuxant hopes that DriverLoader will remain free for end-users.
Interesting. I'd hope that they get some money so that we can keep enjoying this, but at the same time, the words 'trial' and 'licenses' worry me a little. Been spending too much time GNU!
Sig & Below
Yuck Fou
I've been trying to get this working for a day or two without too much luck, but others on the mailing list are reporting success.
One good and important point.. yes, its using binary windows drivers, but they are trying to keep the whole project open source. They are going to hardware vendors who would otherwise like to support Linux, but don't want to port their code to a new architecture. Its a win/win for those who go along with it.
I've been working on getting the Intel Pro/Wireless 2100 card in my T40 working without too much luck yet, but I think its my local problem. Others report great success with the same card.
Yes, I hate the use of non-free drivers. They are buggy and don't get fixed or ported to new kernels. How Linuxant has managed to deal with the differnces between different versions of Windoze is beyond me. I got suckered into buying a wireless card with "Linux support". It tured out to have a binary module for a particular Red Hat kernel that was not easy to compile with my kernel version. It really sucked and I ended up just giving up.
If you think of this as a short term solution to the Microsoft monopoly problem you can smile. Hardware vendors can slip Linuxant specs on the side to make their card work. Linux ditributors can compile the wrapper to work with the correct kernel. What this means is that Microsoft can't punish hardware vendors for giving out information, because they won't know! The "careful dance" vendors have had to do is over. Wireless card makers won't have to worry about their card having "problems" on windoze platorms from the latest windoze "update". Once that happens, there will be no further need for the nasty windoze binaries. Hardware makers will then be able to compete on the basis of what their hardware does, not what M$ wants to "support".
Congratulations to Linuxant.
Fuck you Microsoft, you are circumvented.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If not, then is it possible to do this as open source, there-by removing the problem of this going commercial (much like Crossover)?
As I understand it, there is nothing stopping someone from writting a similar product and releasing it under an open source license.
Is there anything in particular that would stop someone from doing this?
I use to have a funny sig, but slash cut it off, and I forgot what the punchline was.
As someone who has participated in the development of a linux audio driver, and now i'm trying get it ported it to windows, writing drivers for linux is much easier than on windows.
-At first, there "are" linux developer competent enough. There are many willing to help, and stuff gets done.
-I still don't know anyone around me who is capable of writing a WDM driver, but i know quite a bunch of people who are writing kernel drivers all the time.
I guess, we linux (or BSD or what you like) developer should better write a Windows linux driver loader, so hardware makers can release linux only drivers.
For those of us who want only Free Software, what wireless hardware works with Free Software drivers?
Digital Citizen
This is a Good Thing. Running the Windows driver in a wrapper on Linux makes it much easier to reverse-engineer. Anything discovered that way is free of vendors' non-disclosure agreements. This applies to lots of drivers, and lots of manufacturers, not just Intel and Centrino.
NVidia has the right idea. It links a static lib against the interface code (which builds against the installed kernel) during the installer.
That should become standard practice.
Consider DKMS.
It's possible to achieve widespread compatibility, if the developers are paying attention, that is.
did they implement the bluescreen feature?
Otherwise it is available for download here: bsod.c. The really great part about this version is, that you can have bluescreen exactly when you want, I for one use it when it is about time to go to bed.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Linuxant has a short and torrid history in the Linux driver scene. They pretty well burst onto the scene after Marc Boucher got the rights from Conexant to develop kernel drivers for their HSF/HCF chipsets. Users enjoyed a couple years of very well supported drivers (apparently with the manufacturer's financial backing) until about two months ago when Linuxant "announced" their new and improved version of the HCF/HSF modem driver.
Guess what? They decided that development costs were too great and thus, they charge for it now. On top of that they removed all prior free releases of the driver (which worked just fine for all but some of the newest cards and/or some of the more esoteric modem features) from their website. There was no warning for this change, and they began sending marketing emails to their driver -announce list.
With this kind of history, I am wary of supporting any kind of use of their windows-driver wrappers for wireless cards. I am wary that I or my users will grow to rely on these drivers and then have the rug pulled from under our feet. I am wary that hardware manufacturers will grow indifferent to providing native Linux drivers while this product is available and works well. When the time comes that you have to fork out an extra $40 to Linuxant.
Please be aware that I am not opposed to Linuxant marketing their products commercially. It has been my experience that they produce very good work and code that does what it says. It's a shame that the hardware manufacturers cannot seem to support their work financially, as I believe it is in the manufacturers' best interests to see that their hardware works with a wide variety of software and operating systems. For Linuxant not to be up front about this matter is pretty low-brow.
The similarities to their namesake are striking... Linuxant: Keeping the business ideals of Conexant alive and well in the Linux community!
~GoRK
Anyone used these wrappers to say what type of performance they can achieve?
For instance, just putting traffic through a or NAT routine can take up to 10% speed hit if you have no other significant bottlenecks. Yeah, I know, my example isn't apples-to-apples, it's just meant to give an example of a performance hit.
I would imagine a wrapper, even for a completely bug-free alien driver, would have some form of performance degradation and/or extra CPU usage or both.
As a side note, I too am very afraid that this will further stifle linux native device driver support from commercial outfits.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
But when I see something as useful as this, I have to hand it to the developers.
Now a whole family of contemporary laptops have been rendered fully functional under Linux.
Fully functional DESPITE THE INTENTIONAL NEGLECT BY THE CORE VENDORS.
One must wonder why OEM support for Linux is so fragmented; sometimes superb, sometimes completely absent.
Could it be that the financial aspects of Linux make it less appealing somehow? After all, it would be crazy for Intel et.al. to omit Windows support.
Good work guys!
I have an Atheros A/B/G PCI card, and I can say that the Madwifi drivers for this card just aren't ready for prime time - go read the various messages about this card if you don't believe me.
The drivers will crash the kernel, will sometimes simply stop working after a while, and when they are working, they do not transfer data anywhere near the theoretical limits of the card.
The card "sort of" work to access an access point, but if you want to use them to create an access point they just don't work in my experience - I could see the other devices trying to access the system, but the MadWiFi driver was not accepting the connections. This even though I had WEP turned off and had the ESSID's set the same. Furthurmore, the driver's diagnostics simply could not tell me WHY the packets were being dropped.
Yes, the way to improve the native driver is to give feedback, to hack the code, and to try to improve that driver, rather than using the Windows driver, but please do not give people the impression that the Atheros drivers are anything other than extremely pre-alpha and unstable.
The real solution here is to pressure the card drivers to design the cards so that the system driver cannot be made to violate FCC/DTI/... specs - a microcontroller embedded on the card to control the RF adds $.25 to the bill of materials (less if integrated into the ASICs in the card) and would completely remove the problem of open-sourcing the drivers.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I would assume that most manufacturers have competant driver writers and they'd be made more competant if they weren't required to reinvent the wheel each time. The case of NVidia is interesting. It's good they offer drivers, but they are a major pain to obtain to obtain and require you have a clue about shell scripts and other technicalities (e.g. running as root, exiting from X before installing them etc.). Why can't they be shipped with the dist? And if that is not possible for one reason or another, why can't SUSE / Mandrake / RedHat hold your hand and take you to them once the rest of installation is done?
Even if they did grab the installer and run it for you, NVidia demonstrates another problem withthe 'roll your own' situation in Linux. Their installer didn't like my RH9.0 umask (set by default in the OS) and installed files with the wrong permissions. A standard and dist-neutral driver installer mechanism would obviate all these sort of pitfalls.
BTW, you don't have to patch your kernel to add new drivers, there are plenty of drivers distributed as source that will build against the existing kernel.
Which still assumes you have the kernel headers and a complete toolchain. This blows out of the water any chance your average Lindows user might have of installing whatever-it-is. Of course you might get lucky and find a binary module compiled against your particular kernel, but then again you might not.
Anyway I think the dist makers should band together and recognize this is a shared problem and produce the tools and testing labs which allow vendors to produce a single working, signed and tested driver that will run with one dist to the next. Kernel hackers might not care for binary compatibility but I find it hard to believe that such a thing is impossible for dist makers to add.