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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!"
How does he expect people to try out his code without any screen shots????
main(i){(10-putchar(((25208>>3*(i+=3))&7)+(i ?i-4?100:65:10)))?main(i-4):i;}
This is kind of a double edged sword. Now that you can use NDIS drivers under Linux, it will be that much harder to convince these companies that providing a native Linux driver would be good for their business...
If you are in the market for one of these cards, buy from a company that supports your OS of choice...
The wrapper should send an e-mail to the hardware vendor every time it loads. As more people use the wrapper, they get more and more e-mail. Perhaps they would rather write proper Linux drivers than get more e-mail. ;-)
Here's a nice list at HP of cards that work.
Good news : I can get that %^*@$# network card going now.
:
Bad news : Nobody will bother to write Linux drivers soon enough, they'll all say "why bother, we'll just make a Windows driver and tell people to use the wrapper.
Net results
- This makes card vendors inclined to think only the Windows platform is truly important
- This allows Microsoft to have the option of one day changing, subtly messing up or adding undocumented calls to their API, slowly leaving Linux people in the cold as all card vendors transition.
- I would think native drivers are faster / more efficient / more full featured than drivers running under emulation. That might not be the case though, but more often than not, running alien binaries in any OS isn't known to be as fast as the real McCoy.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
There are people here claiming that we'll never see Linux drivers because of this.
The main reason this is required, however, is because the latest chipsets for wireless give too much control to the software. That means the user can theoretically control transmit levels and frequencies, and make their transmission interfere with other people's communication.
Since the transmit power levels and frequencies are all set differently in different parts of the world, the closed-source software is needed to restrict people's control over the hardware.
And that is a real bummer. It is hard to support closed-source Linux drivers - people don't particularly like them, there are thousands of different kernels out there (each distribution has about fifty or so current at any one time, not to mention all the patches you can download from kernel.org).
As a result, this doesn't surprise me at all. I think it's probably the only way modern WiFi will be supported under Linux. That doesn't translate to the end of the world, however, since the regulatory situation is quite different for almost everything else in the computer.
Read more carefully: There is a way to build it in 2.4.x since about yesterday.
"Since the transmit power levels and frequencies are all set differently in different parts of the world, the closed-source software is needed to restrict people's control over the hardware. "
It's a matter of opinion that "restricting people's control over the hardware" is necessary or appropriate. If there is some compelling state interest, then it should be considered a defective and/or dangerous product, which ought to be dispensable only to licensed purchasers.
Treating it as a problem that the consumer owns does not solve the problem. Just because the manufacturer hasn't enabled the consumer to alter the card's programming, doesn't change the fact that the dangerous device has been distributed into the wild.
As soon as some independent party (not subject to the US law-by-agency-order), creates software to unlock these cards, the disabled-by-obscurity features will be open. If that's a problem for the state, then they should have considered it before allowing the product to be sold.
If some product can be converted to a weapon, the fact is, the weapon is in the consumer's hands whether you've told him how to convert it or not. You hold some of the responsibility for this product getting into the consumer's hands.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
Following your argument, why don't the wireless card makers release specs then? If they're off the hook regarding using these wireless chipsets for illicit purposes, why don't they just release the specs?
Because every hardware company that releases a product believes that they either
Have a competitive advantage and need to keep it a secret.
or
Have a crap design and need to keep it a secret.
or
Have the same design as everyone else and need to keep it a secret.