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NDIS Wrapper For Wireless LAN Cards Under GPL

Posted by timothy on from the subvert-the-cooption-and-vice-versa dept.

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!"

4 of 222 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong by Trolling4Dollars · · Score: 0, Troll

    That should have been "Firstus Pontus"!!!! :P

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    Un-news
  2. Re:Cross Platform Drivers by theparanoidcynic · · Score: 0, Troll

    The fact that it'd be easy to do doesn't change the fact that Microsoft would set loose the squads of ninja attack lawyers and have the engineers find a way to fuck it in the next service pack.
    Do you think hardware vendors want to have lawyers fucking them with a service pack? Didn't think so.

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    Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
  3. What a private business would do to fight this... by zymano · · Score: -1, Troll

    A commercial business would take these harware makers to court since they are only making their product to work with only ONE company . Microsoft has been to court over their monopoly practices and has lost. There should be LAW that states that these hardware makers must release documentation\specs or create drivers for open source. If you ask yourself why should a private company be forced to hand out their own secrets then think about this , those same companies make alot of their money on electronic standards that are open to everyone so hardware can be interoperable(DDR-Ram/Mobos). My problem is mainly with the government case and how shortsighted it was. They needed to tackle the computermakers(OEM=orig.equip.manuf.) that have only one operating system available to new computers(microsoft) and these specialized hardware makers that could care less about anything other than Windows. The law must correct unfairness in the markets and they still aren't doing it.

    Thank you.
    Eric Martin

  4. Re:Kernel space? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Why don't you think about it a little more, bdonlan@users.sf.net, ok?