NDIS Wrapper For Wireless LAN Cards Under GPL

An anonymous reader writes " Shortly after Linuxant has released their commercial DriverLoader, Pontus Fuchs has made an NDIS wrapper available under the GPL. Since some vendors refuse to release specifications or even a binary Linux-driver for their Wireless LAN cards he has decided to solve it himself by making a kernel module that can load Microsoft-Windows NDIS drivers. ndiswrapper has been tested with some BroadCom miniPCI cards and it seems to work on some laptops . With some more work it should be possible to support more cards. Hopefully this will be the case for the many owners of Linux laptops based on Intel's Centrino technology. Please contact Pontus if you are interested in helping out!"

Comments

Microsoft. ;)

[theparanoidcynic]

It wouldn't work because Microsoft would never buy into it. They'd much rather that official drivers be for Windows only, and since they're 90% market share they'll get their way.

For the time being it appears that binary Windows drivers will become the de-facto standard for hardware-specific drivers at least until Microsoft starts falling apart and/or somebody comes up with a good way to make native binary drivers work with our plethora of kernels.