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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;}
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