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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?
awesome. now linux too can have buggy drivers!
gotta wonder, did they implement the bluescreen feature?
If your WMP11 uses an x86, sure.
Why do hardware manufacturers not release drivers for Linux (or for that matter any other non-Windows/Macintosh platform)? It would seem that the idea would be, more supported plaforms = wider customer base = more profit. I can understand how development might be an issue... but considering OS'es like Linux are open source, it would seem that development would be at least marginally easier and cheaper. Has anyone written/emailed/asked a HW maker this question? What was their reply?
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
Now hardware vendors can blow off developing drivers for Linux. "Just download the wrapper and use the Win32 driver."
One CPU cycle wasted on digital restrictions management is ONE TOO MANY.
Its a win/win for those who go along with it.
:)
I would have thought it was more a case of win/linux for those who go along with it.
Ouch. Did I actually just make a joke that lame?
People couldn't type. We realized: Death would eventually take care of this.
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.
As soon as they release the source, the community maintains it. Try that with windows drivers.
Not at all. What most people don't realize is that Slashdot passed the Turing Test some time ago. All those "Anonymous Cowards" are actually generated by a self-aware AI running in the background on Google's processor array.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
This is commonly cited, but I've never seen any actual evidence. Looking at, for example, public information regarding Atheros' wireless chipsets, the RF bits include bandpass filtering to prevent the device from radiating in adjacent bands. No amount of register fiddling is going to change the underlying physics of the situation. My Cisco Aironet radio can be configured to radiate outside of power and band limits for most of the markets where it was sold, but that doesn't prevent them from releasing the source code to the driver.
I look at the situation like this: you could replace a capacitor or resistor or oscillator on the radio to make it out-of-spec, and maybe you could do the same thing by writing the wrong value in a register. But either way, the user is has to hack either the hardware or the software. Hardware hacking concerns don't prevent the sale of radios, and software hacking concerns shouldn't prevent the sale of radio drivers.
I don't want to start a holy war here, but what is the deal with you DriverLoader fanatics? I've been sitting here at a cafe close to my freelance gig sipping a latte in front of a centrino Linux laptop running DriverLoader for about 4 hours now while it attempts to download a 17 kilobyte file from the internet. 4 hours. At home, on my Commodore 64 connecting to the Internet using a modem with an acoustic coupler connected using a speakerphone across the room, which by all standards should be a lot slower than this laptop, the same operation would take about 30 minutes. If that.
In addition, during this file transfer, Mozilla won't work. And my latte has gone cold waiting for a ssh session to negotiate. Even ed over a telnet session (unencrypted over wireless! insecure, I know, but I'm desperate) to my C64 running Lunix is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various Centrino laptops running DriverLoader, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a wirelessly connected centrino laptop that has run faster than its Commodore counterpart with acoustic-coupler speakerphone wireless, despite the Centrino's faster chip architecture. My Atari 2600 with 128 bytes of ram with avian carrier RFC1149 wireless runs faster than this centrino machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that the LinuxLoader is a superior piece of software.
LinuxAnt addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use DriverLoader over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
I have to say, that although binary, these drivers are very good. I am using them on my notebook and they just work. I had a little problem with 1.03 version, but since 1.20 they work very good. These people know what they are doing, they have download for every current kernel used in major versions of major distributions. And they want to provide that for free if the manufacturers chip in for their effort. I welcome that my internal wireless card is working NOW and not in 2004. Thank you, Linuxant.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
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.
Although the DriverLoader apparently supports these cards, please support these companies in either helping develop Linux driver support or releasing specifications (both of which Intel and Broadcom adamantly refuse to do) by
a) purchasing their products when you have a choice (e.g. buy Pentium-M instead of Centrino and add on a third-party wireless card, and don't buy 802.11g products from Linksys or Dell which use Broadcom), and
b) Use the open-source drivers rather than emulating windows drivers, let the chip (Atheros and Globespan/Virata nee Intersil) and the card companies know that you appreciate their linux support. Report bugs and feedback to the open source projects, too.
It's nice to have something like this around as a stopgap way to load drivers for hardware made by manufacturers with poor linux support, and even as a way for manufacturers to ship initial drivers for linux inexpensively for them (and claim "linux support out of the box"), but it is no substitute for published specs and real drivers (which, with published specs, the companies don't even have to develop themselves).
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 recently wrote a nice letter to Intel about the built-in wifi card on my ThinkPad X31, to ask whether Linux (or FreeBSD! Yay!) drivers would ever be available?
I got a very friendly response from them:
Hello John,
Thank you for contacting Intel(R) Technical Support.
In order for Linux to run on Intel(R) Centrino(TM) mobile technology-based systems,
software drivers are needed for the processor, chipset, and 802.11 wireless
components. Currently Linux drivers are available for the Intel(R) Pentium(R) M
processor and Intel(R) 855PM and 855GM chipsets. A Linux driver for the Intel(R)
PRO/Wireless 2100 wireless network connection is currently under development.
You can check back at the following link for the latest information on Linux driver
support for the Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2100 network connection.
http://support.intel.com/support/network/sb/cs-
Sincerely,
Roberto G.
Intel(R) Technical Support
http://support.intel.com
Intel is a registered trademark of Intel Corporation or its subsidiaries in the
United States and other countries.
*Other names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.
->Hi there,
->
->I recently bought a Thinkpad X31, after great experiences with an X20.
->The only weakness is the lack of Linux/FreeBSD drivers (first thing
->I did was netboot FreeBSD and re-format XP off the drive) for the
->built in WiFi interface. I know there are currently no plans for these,
->but please consider this yet another happy X31 user, who'd love to see
->some nice person write a driver.
->
->Cheers,
->
->-John
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage