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Linux Centrino Driver Update
Edy52285 writes "An article on News.com talks about how Intel has been, and still is, dragging on releasing their Linux drivers for Centrino. Intel is reluctant to release its drivers as open source since doing so would reveal secrets about their wireless hardware. Linux in currently unable to take advantage of Centrino's wireless networking devices, without, that is, prying $20 from your thin wallet to buy Linuxant's DriverLoader (discussed in an earlier story). Will Swope (Intel's General Manager of Software and Solutions Group) said in an interview said "What I believe will happen is we will end up having a Linux compatibility driver that is not open source at first, then designing future drivers in such a way that they are open source but will not expose intellectual property," Intel seem to be taking its time on releasing the drivers, and even in the article, there is a lack of any commitment on a date or under what conditions the drivers will be released." Also, someone pointed out that it's worth checking out ndiswrapper for the driver.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Hardware details -- it's like a chef not wanting to talk about his latest recipie, because that's the big secret. Sure, you and I probably don't have the cookware (hardware fab plant), but other restaurants (AMD and Qualcomm) would probably be very interested.
Not true. I'm using the open-source ndiswrapper project together with the win32 drivers, and it works, although a bit buggy. See here
...I won't buy a "Centrino" laptop. That's fine, since Apple's laptops are looking more appealing anyway, and still run Linux. Some of those new AMD offerings in mobile computing, as well as Tranmeta's installation in some of the Sony lines make them nice options as well.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
> What secrets are these?
At a guess: "Trade Secrets"; those pesky things that give you an advantage over your direct competitors in a market.
These sigs are more interesting tha
Why should anyone be surprised that a company that makes its money off of proprietary designs should be at odds with a movement to wrest control away from proprietary vendors?
Isn't this why Stallman insists on running only Free software?
I have been pwned because my
Intel PRO/Wireless Lan (Centrino)
For more info:
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/
Controlling a microwave radio with bits on a data bus from a digital processor issuing an interrupt signal is an invention and highly protected intellectual property. Please respect that. Jobs are at stake.
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/
This is an open source implementation that allows linux users to load their windows drivers and use their WiFi cards.
Its still very new, but there has been some success with the centrino chipset, as well as Admtek, Atheros and Broadcom cards.
Why don't they do like nVidia, release a pre-compiled binary driver core and an open-source, compilable interface, which hopefully will manage to unify all diferences between different kernel versions and distros ?
Alvie
We had exactly this problem.
Our solution was to write a proprietry driver, and then write a wrapper for this to interface it to the kernel. Release the wrapper under the GPL, then release our proprietry software as closed source.
Only buy opensource supported products. The demand
will drive the market. This is also what we would need to do as soon as the PC gets locked up with
the new Award Bios. Demand has to be so low that it
will just about drive the home PC vendors out of business. then and only then DRM will be dropped.
I'm stocking up on some hardware now, that way if my
desktop or firewall does die, I can build a new one.
Much of the actual work of the Centrino wireless hardware is performed in software, much like the "Winmodems" that were so widespread a few years ago (and, I guess, still are - does anyone make a modem with an actual UART on it anymore?) Intel is hesitant to provide the information that will allow people to write a driver for Linux, because that information would necessarily provide 100% of the software engineering necessary for someone else to create a Centrino-like hardware solution.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
Think like a capitalist and vote with your wallet.
Until they have a proper Linux driver, buy an AMD based system instead.
AFAIK, the radio emissions from the wireless card are regulated (by the FCC in the US?) so as to avoid interference with other spectrum users. Much of this regulation is acheived through the close-source drivers.
Using modified drivers, it would be possible to make the card emit different frequencies or more power, thereby violating the usage licence.
Other chipmakers, I presume. So that nobody could produce an alternative wireless card to go with a Pentium M processor or some such.
But wouldn't anyone who's capable of designing and producing his own chipset be able to dissect the Centrino architecture and reengineer it, either by careful blackbox testing or by actually taking a microscope and looking at the chips? Am I way off mark here?
But if it's not other chipmakers they are protecting this from, if it actually is a software issue, then they are simply dancing to the tune of Microsoft due to whatever behind-the-scenes agreement they have with them.
Still, the fact is that Linux runs on almost anything you throw it at, only beasted by NetBSD. The trick is to buy supported hardware, which really isn't that hard.
(typing this on a Centrino-based WinXP laptop)
Indeed.
However, when I decided to purchase a decent wireless card , I would've liked to have been able to use it under Linux without paying extra. When you spend nearly UKP50 on the card, a discount on the Linuxant driver (at the very least!) would have been a nice gesture.
Works perfectly on my Compaq Presario X1000
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
"Intel is hesitant to provide the information that will allow people to write a driver for Linux, because that information would necessarily provide 100% of the software engineering necessary for someone else to create a Centrino-like hardware solution."
Well, that sucks for them. Perhaps they should have built a real wireless device rather than taking away CPU time for something that is best handled by a seperate device.
This revealed, do most linux users even want a Centrino-based laptop?
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
In all honesty, I can't see what is so special about Centrino that Intel wants to keep it so secret.
It's a freaken' wireless chipset and a power efficient CPU. It's not like no one else makes them.
The other solution is:
To buy "AMD Athlon XP Mobile" or "AMD Duron Mobile" or "AMD Athlon64 Mobile" or magically "AMD Athlon32 SOI".
open4free
What I believe will happen is we will end up having a Linux compatibility driver that is not open source at first, then designing future drivers in such a way that they are open source but will not expose intellectual property
So in other words, Intel is considering open source projects in the future. Isn't this news to get a little excited about?
How often in the past have companies brushed aside Linux? Many, many times. It gives me a bit of a fuzzy feeling inside to see guys like this being honest and forthright towards the Linux community.
I know in the short term it would be great if they would give us a bit more respect, but look a little further down the road...big companies are feeling pressure to do things the open-source way.
M-Systems' DiscOnChips are very nice flash chips which we use in some ThinClients. While there is support for those in the 2.4.x kernel tree it never worked for us. So we took M-Systems drivers.
.o file which is the real driver which does the real work. This way you can build kernel modules for you favourite kernel with M-Systems not releasing any "critical" source code.
:-)
.o file which links together a kernel module. Et voila: Neutrino support for every kernel without releasing the real source code !
Now they seem to be in a similar boat: they don't like to give out their intellectual property. Their solution is what looks like a driver stub and a binary
This practice means that you can't compile the driver into the kernel, you have to build a module (since the GPL does not allow building that propietary driver into the GPL'ed kernel, but allows non-GPL'ed kernel modules since they are not part of the resulting program or so... at least this what I recall Linus saying about that subject).
But having a module does the job as well, using an initrd we can boot from M-Systems DoC perfectly (in Real Mode they are accessible like a harddisk). The extra-effort is worth it since in our experience they are a lot more reliable than Flash IDE Chips, and reliablity is an important factor in embedded systems like ThinClients
Intel could do it the same way: release a driver stub and a binary
If we believe that software should be free, i.e. open and accessible to anyone, either for ethical reasons or simply because it will result in better technology, then I don't see why hardware should be any different. This world would be a better place if I had an enforceable right to get the specs of my car, my fridge, or my laptop, if I so desire.
I know that the word is taboo around here, but isn't this precicely what (hardware) patents are for? From what I understand, they are pretty easy to get.
Intel has been using linux to bring up there new products for years. If they want to protect there ip then the least they can do is release a driver in the manner of the nvidia driver is release. Sure I would perfer a total open source driver but baby steps would be ok for now.
And you base this on what?
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
Presiding Council: What say you, Mr. Slashdot Ambassador?
Slashdotter: Ahem......FUCK INTEL!
is "don't buy any hardware that hit the market less than 6 months ago." This usually gives kernel hackers enough time to reverse-engineer the Windows drivers (which have worked from the start) to a useable alpha release.
Please respect that. Jobs are at stake.
Well, they were. The last of the engineers were fired last Thursday.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Read this post about using the Windows NDIS centrino driver (and other drivers) on FreeBSD, using the "NDISulator" (a.k.a. "Project Evil"). See this post for details on Project Evil. And unlike the linuxant thing, this is free.
They take time. What would be the point of finally shelling out centrino 5yrs down the road? And backroyalties would be pointless because the patented technology would be so outdated.
The whole Centrino bit is a textbook monopolist tactic called a tying agreement. Intel can skirt around it because its still offering the pentium-m, but with no marketing support. The general customer is really confused and assumes that if the laptop does not have the centrino sticker, its not the best one.
This revealed, do most linux users even want a Centrino-based laptop?
Hells yeah! I'm within a year of replacing my old PIII 550Mhz Compaq laptop, which has been a trusty and faithful machine until recently but is now starting to give me hardware problems.
My next machine would be a Dell 300M running SUSE because it's ultra-portable, but thanks to Intel dragging their feet my next machine will probably be a G5 powerbook running Fink. Actually, Dell gets part-credit. Their recent quality control problems have made me suspect the reliability of their hardware.
That's the way the market works. Hey Intel, thanks for playing, but this ball just went over the fence!
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Trying to obscure hardware by only handing out binary-only drivers and hiding the API from the average programmer does not help at all against professional counterfeiting / industrial espionage. But it's quite amusing to see a company like Intel play the security-by-obscurity song.
They should know better.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and make the device larger and take up more power? That would defeat the purpose of this laptop technology.
So why didn't they wrap the secrets in a more abstract interface? Why must the software API expose these secrets?
Joe
Joe Batt Solid Design
next generation of laptops considering Broadcom & Philips have already cooked up
their own even lower power chipset.
I won't make any claims on the validity of these numbers{---Google Cache
Since i couldn't find the Yahoo Article they mention
- $12 a chipset
- 97% less power consumption than Intel Centrino in standby mode
- 70% less transmit power consumption
- 90% less receive power consumption
- 802.11g "not that far away"
~And this was October 2003
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
These card are relatively inexpensive. There's no particular reason to pick a Centrino laptop because of the built-in WLAN support.
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
But wouldn't it be obvious that your stealing their IP? If Intel found out, they can just sue them. I'm sure the tech is patented so AMD would have to license it to use it anyway.
I'm sure your boycott of intel will work as well as your boycott of MS and Amazon.com and the MPAA and the RIAA and your boycott of English class.
I've been a Linux zealot since 1995, but just two annoying things have forced me to spend 90% of my time booted into my WinXP partition on my Panasonic toughbook:
:-/
- swsusp is not reliable. Sorry, but I can't be patient when my fucking laptop hangs on the 2nd or 3rd resume. Cold booting and shutting down is just too damned slow, so I rarely bother anymore.
- lack of Centrino support. Bastards at Intel! I would not have purchased this laptop if I knew I would have gotten shafted on Linux support -- especially when I was under the impression Intel was Linux-friendly!)
Oh, and I guess a 3rd problem has begun to rear its ugly head now that I'm getting into video capture and editing via firewire. Namely driver support and applications.
Ah, but I'll never give up Linux on the server OR my main desktop.
I track known Slashdot scumbags on my foes list!
Are a pain in the ass. I noticed this the day a colleague tried to install Windows 1900 on a "Made for XP" notebook. OEM drivers were nowhere to be found, and all the new drivers refused to install because they were "optimized for XP." The CDs that came with the machine were only "disk image restore" CDs. so re-installing the OS was impossible.
Linux (Red Hat 9), of course, installed without so much as an extra line feed, and supported each and every device perfectly. This was a fairly new notebook as well. It was amazing.
Can't figure out why manufacturers go out of their way to make it difficult for people to work with their own computers the way they want. Centrino should be supported, especially with notebooks being as expensive as they are.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Maybe I just missed the point when I used Linux. I didn't pick it up. I'd rather use MS-DOS 6.22 than Linux. Mind you, I liked DOS very much and I didn't want to migrate to Windows at all when 95 came out. What makes it so vital to you /. readers?
-Scott
Dell has been having QC problems for...years. Almost since the very start of the company. It has to do with theier business model.
Why would they go out of their way to risk it? Not only that, but trying to detect and then further prove that a particular hardware feature has been infringed upon in someone else's chip?
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
Since then I haven't wasted a single second searching for drivers or wrestling with hardware to get it to work. Sleep and restore works 100% of the time. Bluetooth and wireless LAN are bulletproof. I'd almost forgotten what it was like until I read this article.
In some circles using an Nvidia card does make you an outcast. Of course, those circles have a great deal in commong with extreme religious zealots, thusly making them some of the most judgemental and often irrational people to deal with.
Which is entirely to bad as some of what that group of does is extremely interesting and they have a tremendous number of things that they can contribute to greater society, but their extremely narrow views puts them at odds with the greater majority of society. Due to this, they actually go against what it means to be 'open'.
A good example is the UI programmer Mosfet, if I am remembering the name correctly, making it 'impossible' to compile his/her code on Redhat due to his/her philosophical leanings. It's really to bad since that that software is pretty darn cool and it would be really great if it was actually Open Source instead of partially Open Source due to zealous philosophical views.
If you ignore the other uses of a tool, does that make the tool less useful, or you less useful?
Intel's entire strategy over the last 10 years has been precisely to move as many functions as possible into the CPU. This enables them to justify selling processors with far more horsepower than anybody needs for word processing or browsing, and it lets them assert control and influence over a much larger fraction of the hardware market.
That's why they keep adding more multimedia-oriented units to their architecture; it's also why they designed the P4's memory architecture to be mainly good at streaming blocks of video data.
Their strategy has been relatively successful up to now. There's just no way that they would design a totally stand-alone wireless solution to be tightly marketed with their CPUs.
In fact, just from the Centrino marketing material, you'd get the impression that the CPU itself is handling the wireless functions. Perhaps they plan to move that logic into a future mobile CPU chip.
Centrino's wireless networking speed is slow as hell anyway. 11 Mb/s! Wow, 1992 networking speed. Ho-hum. When it reaches gigabit ethernet, then maybe it would be worthwhile. Until then, it's lame and behind the times. Who needs it.
Wow, if that's true, this makes me want a Centrino laptop even more now. :)
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
most US companies PRAY they'll get away with producing something that'll get snapped up by the GP due to a flaw or workaround that makes the item valuable.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
> They should know better
Odds are Intel does know better than you armchair engineers.
I keep wondering why no one has sued Intel yet for
unfair business practices. Obviously even under US laws withholding information on hardware while providing it to select OS vendors can't be legal?
That's fine, because it makes the case even clearer. So what I'm buying when I buy Centrino is actually closed source, proprietary software. And I can't even ditch it like the operating system that came with my laptop, because the software is so closed that it even locks up some of my hardware from me if I don't use it.
If Centrino is all-software (or mostly-software), all the better. Then all the arguments why I don't like it have already been made.
What could they so desperately want to keep secret? Usually there's just no reason for a hardware manufacturer wanting to keep secret the information necessary to write a driver. When they do this, it's out of ignorance (or sometimes Microsoft threats, but I havn't heard evidence of this happening lately).
What could Intel's motivation be? Is it to hide a huge flaw, or to hide a huge security vulnerability such as backdoored encryption?
Intel has partnered with M$ before and it doesn't supprise me they have a slow down going on supporting the Linux platform. Once I heard Intel was embracing, making special strides, supporting Windows DRM in their chips I decided my next purchase would not be an Intel.
Their company statement that they whole heartedly support DRM and will include it in their chips gave me pause. I don't want my CPU deciding and or regulating my morality. I certainly don't want my CPU playing digital overseer. It has enough to do running my PC.
And now, there's a reluctance and slow down supporting Linux with their chip. And after their partnership with M$ this doesn't supprise me.
It may well be that Intel will become the Windows CPU and AMD and/or others will be for the rest of us.
Distrust begets distrust. Secrets beget snooping. If someone (Intel) is going to be so damned hypocritical and lavish in Linux's support of it's product lines (especially the nice early Itanium support while Microsoft was getting is OS finished) they had better not complain when someone "hacks" a solution out of the chip.
It's like the who DVD-CSS mess. Linux people just wanted to be able to watch DVD's without runnning Windows. What resulted was a hack that made convertion of DVD's into cheap Divx copies easy and painless.
It feels like dating someone who never trusts you, never earns your trust (or respect) and goes hysterical when you don't behave exactly how they want. Reminds me of an ex-girlfriend, frankly.
Murray Todd Williams
The problem lies in Intels inherent desire to eat spare cpu cycles. Why? Because the more cpu cycles wasted on things better handled in hardware the more incentive to upgrade your cpu.
Those spare cycles could do something better than doing the hardwares work. Microsoft wants to have it all in windows if they can. That way they can tie the whole platform to windows cementing the monopoly on desktops. MS and Intel have had their jousts and Intel have always folded under the pressure. Intels project to make hardware more platform agnostic was stopped by MS who saw a threat to their Wintel Symbios.
There is nothing stopping eg. device drivers from being implemented much lower down like in the actual hardware, talking only in pre standardized APIs. Whats stopping that great innovation that would put a stop to driver problems and make it much more easy to develop new products?
Guess once!
HTTP/1.1 400
But competing restaurants (AMD, Qualcomm) have the resources to send some samples of the meal to a chemical analysis lab (disassemble the object code), and learn the secrets that way.
I've simply removed from my laptop the Intel Pro Wireless 2100 WiFi Mini-PCI card and replaced it with a Atheros 802.11a/b/g chipset. The Multiband Atheros Driver for Wifi (aka MadWifi) is well supported under Linux. It even has a great FAQ.
The card I bought is an IBM 11a/b/g Wireless LAN MiniPCI Adapter (IBM Part Number: 31P9701), and works flawlessly under REHL3.
If that's the real reason, how come they release them as binaries? Reverse engineering will reveal exactly the same information (eh, sorry, intellectual property) as inspecting the source code, although it takes a little bit more work. So, does anyone think Intel gave the real reason?
Congratulations you illiterate Hooked on Phonics idiot.
I got a Dell Inspiron 8600 with Centrino technology and am typing on it now. It has a 1.4GHz Pentium-M processor. I got it for the battery life, I can do average (not idle) tasks for over 4 hours straight on the single 72 watt-hour battery (a second is available). I tried and successfully put a Knoppix CD in the drive and it booted up fine. It works but I probably can't get the same longer battery life. I'm pretty happy with this laptop, and squeezing another hour out of a battery on an operating system I don't primarily use isn't going to make me regret my decision.
It seems that every so-called "linux backer" has an excuse for not wanting to actually do anything of benefit to Linux. If it isn't IBM not porting their Lotus applications, its HP running off with SCO promoting their latest snake oil and now we have Intel more concerned about protecting their IP than actually serving the needs of their customers.
I am all for Intel protecting their IP, and sure, if I were in their shoes, I too wouldn't want $10million or so worth of R&D fall down the drain, yet, on the other hand, they need to realise the reality of what is happening.
If Intel want to do something great, why don't they help produce an abstraction layer in which all drivers can be compiled against and no have to worry about each kernel release, 2.4.17 -> 2.4.18 (for example) breaking compatibility. Sure, some "breakage" is understandable, especially when fixing major bugs, however, breakage every release? thats beyond annoying, it is plain out stupid.
This would enable Intel (and other companies) to produce binary drivers and for users to fully utilise all the nifty features of their fancy new gizmo.
--It only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single idea.
I hear this over and over, and I don't doubt that it's true. However, isn't that what the law is for? It's illegal to shoot somebody with a gun, but there are no controls in place to prevent me from doing just that. If somebody tweaks their wifi software and breaks the law, then use the law to make them pay for their crime.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
(AMD and Qualcomm) would probably be very interested.
Those guys are probably the least interested. Their engineers know exactly how to make similar devices. The only ones that might be interested are some third world country's bootleg industry. And they can/will reverse engineer the devices anyhow.
All these "Oh, we can't release the specs, that would reveal our secrets!", are pretty full of it. There are very, very few hardware/software solutions that aren't widely known. It gets really silly when companies such as NVidia refuse to release info to the XFree community, due to their hardware secrets. For heaven's sake! Even the insides of such (more or less) proprietary devices as the PS2, the GameCube, and so on are well known...
P4 mobile's are good. Fuck the Centrino.
That's the way NVIDIA does it, right?
I would rather have a closed source driver, than no driver at all.
With Linux getting a larger userbase and more companies makes drivers, we'll have to accept that they don't necessary release drivers GPL'ed.
I imagine that one reason that Intel doesn't want to release these details is because the driver has too much control over the device. If as much work as it seems is done by the processor, then that probably means you could force the chip to do some strange things. The most obvious ones that come to mind are a) increase power (although I can't really see why that would be a problem), b) sniff to your heart's content, and c) try a DOS attack on any nearby networks by saturating the airwaves with crap.
Intel doesn't want to risk being associated with these kinds of things (and you know if they released an open source driver, someone would).
This still doesn't however totally explain their not releasing a closed-source driver...
Combination - fun iPhone puzzling
I made the mistake of buying a Dell Inspiron about a year ago. Within a month the screen developed horizontal lines of dead pixels. So I RMA'd it to Dell and they sent me a new one. Within a month, the case on that one cracked. I'm not even hard on the damn things! So once again, I send it to Dell, who kindly sends me a third new one. Within TWO WEEKS, the touchpad dies. Dell says this is a common problem with no fix. I send back the laptop, get a refund, and tell Dell "Fuck you with a cactus pole." I then go and buy a _USED_ ThinkPad on eBay and it has been serving me well ever since with NO PROBLEMS AT ALL. Runs Slackware perfect.
Odds are Intel does know better than you armchair engineers.
Having worked there up until a few years ago, I'd say that most of them agree with the "armchair engineers" and think it's silly to try to hide stuff this way. But there are (lets see, where's that Post Anonymously button?) flaming morons in various management positions (mostly marketing) that are totally clueless. AMD, et al. have the resources to disassemble the binary only drivers anyway, so the only thing you are doing is slowing the adoption by technically oriented users, but they can not / will not see this.
We even had people like Linus, ESR, BP, etc. come out and do dog & pony shows about why it's a Good Idea to open things like this up, but the only thing that seems to be working is a gradual process of selective retirement of the morons. (Intel's culling process to rid itself of the clueless can best be described as "brutal".) Saddly (since I still have stock & and friends in Intel) there is a fair voluntary exodus of the cluefull as well.
-- Anonomous Coward
P.S. The funniest part of the dog & pony show was when one of the PHPs listed among the downside of open sourcing the "fact" that it would piss off MS.
The legal department people who were there were not clueless and came down on the poor idiot like a ton of lead. From the hurt look on his face I think he expected them to side with him.
Have Intel invented the WinWiFi?
Didn't anybody learn from the WinPrinter and WinModem farces?
There is nothing that says that their drivers must be GPL'ed (at least to my knowledge). They can still release free drivers, and as long as they do not use GPL'ed software and follow the licensing rules to creating software for the linux kernel, they should need to release the source code to the drivers.
Seriously, doesn't Intel even understand the GPL? I mean, I may be mistaken, but as long as they do not use GPL'ed software in their code and release drivers for the different kernel versions, there shouldn't be a problem.
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
Most countries have pretty strict controls both on real guns and also on replica guns, as they can be modified to fire live ammo if not properly made.
I imagine it is easier for Intel to get approval for their wireless devices if they can't be modified, than if they were selling an easily modifiable computer controlled tranmitter.
Maybe they don't want people to have access to it because the hardware could be used for other things than just wireless LAN.
Depending on the hardware, who knows maybe someone could even implement GSM/PCS on it. Whatever may be the case, having access to hardware like this would allow people to play around with it.
What is SDR?
GNU SDR implementation
Even with binary-only drivers it's still possible to patch them. There are literally countless keygens and crack-patches out there for commercial software. Hacking a binary driver in this way should be similar, whether it's legal is not the point here. Unless of course the binary is encrypted in some clever way at the hardware level, degrading performance even more and making patching difficult. Oh wait.. isn't that what Trusted Computing is all about? *shudders*
Learn from the mistakes of others. There isn't enough time to make them all yourself.
I assume this is all MiniPCI and you have a thinkpad?
Absolutely true. Linksys's wireless router (WRT54G) is essentially a software controlled radio. Using the ping interface it is possible to enter commands and the router will execute them. One of these is increasing transmit power. I believe most of these hacks and features were discovered because the firmware runs embedded linux and the source code to the router is GPL'ed.
I think Intel is wrong here. Big companies are going to reverse engineer it anyway. The source code isn't needed by them. The small companies that could benefit from the source code wouldn't have economies of scale to compete anyway.
You have 5 Moderator Points! Use 'em or lose 'em! They will expire before any good stories are posted.
Last I checked Wireless was a STANDARD that everybody could read. WHere is the secret in standards?
When I emailed people at Intel over this matter, they eluded to the fact that releasing the source to a centrino wireless driver would violate FCC rules. Basically, the radiomodem in centrinos are totally programmable. That means, if you have the code, you can broadcast whatever you want on whatever frequency you want. You can violate FCC rules, and the FCC doesn't like that. Therefore, to be FCC certified, the user can not be able to change certain parts of the modem.
It sounds plausible, but they also could have been blowing smoke.
Regards,
jdif
Let's overcome our weakness.
Are there any decently cheap wifi cards supported by the 2.6 kernel (in the kernel source)?
It is possible that as with some Atheros-based WLAN cards (the D-Link DWI-G650 Bx for example), the radio in Intel's Centrinos is software-controlled. This means that its frequency and power can be changed to just about anything using software alone. Open-source drivers for something like this are out of the question -- the FCC would not be impressed.
Atheros' ended up releasing a binary-only driver... kernel-tainting and all. If the Centrino radio controllers are also software-based, you can expect a binary-only driver as well.
Avoiding releasing source to hide "hardware" secrets from financially strong competitors strikes me as fairly dumb in practice, sounds like typically PHBism.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Look, if they dont provide the drivers and there are no open source equivalents, its quite simple... choose a different product.
Electronic Music Made Using Linux http://soundcloud.com/polyp
For some, DOS is fine.
It's only a question of using the right platform fro your computing needs.
I find that Linux is very appropriate for engineers or serious computer users because of its flexibility.
Of course, Dell or some other OEM could conceivably sell systems pre-installed with Linux, as installation and configuration seem to me to be the biggest hurdles, and then you could see home linux users just using Linux and seeing its benefits too.
I think the 200$ Wal-Mart Lindows PC was a step in that direction. I may have some details wrong though.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
This is indeed an MiniPCI card, but I don't have an IBM ThinkPad. I use a HP Compaq nx7000 with RHEL3.
Much of the command line is Linux and BSD derrived, X11 runs integrated with the Mac WindowServer; hell, the thing comes with Apache pre-installed with a "Start Webserver" button from the GUI.
Why even re-install when I can run anything right in the Mac OS?
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
Perhaps they plan to move that logic into a future mobile CPU chip.
yes they do. and into everything
Ya, for the battery reasons. the only laptops that can compare are Powerbooks, and if i understand right, with most distros, the ppc version tends to lag behind.
The situation is pretty infuriating with the video drivers for laptops with integrated graphics on 855GM chipset. Many of these come with a 1400x1050 SXGA+ lcd display but a bios that does not know how to switch to this mode. (No kidding, it can do 1024x768, 1280x1024, etc, but NOT the native lcd resolution...) Intel has not released specs to let the XF86 developers program the video modes from the driver, so X Windows is entirely dependent on the BIOS.
Result is your spiffy new SXGA+ laptop with Intel integrated graphics can only do a fuzzy interpolation at lower effective resolution. Needless to say, the Windows driver authors had all the info they needed to program the driver.
And you guess what trouble you will have getting the laptop to display on an attached external monitor....
Well, thanks for your efforts to help Intel (as ESR would say) "get it".
However, given that they've been rather upfront on this specific issue, I think it's more likely there's an actual hangup (legal rights, FCC, etc) than a comprehension gap.
Why do I detect elitism in your post? As though engineers and serious computer users are only found among Linux users... And who gives a shit anyways? The reason why Microsoft is winning the OS war, is because they make it easy for anybody, whether engineer, homemaker, or truck driver, to purchase a computer and be instantly productive. Linux users think their platform's uber-complexity makes them 1337 or something. Get a fscking clue!
Err, the whole point of "Centrino" is marketing, pure and simple.
The term "Centrino" is a 100% pure marketing term. There is absolutely ZERO technology connected to it, it just means that you are using an Intel Pentium M processor with a an Intel motherboard chipset and an Intel wifi chip.
The trick behind all this though is that if you combine those three elements then Intel will give you MUCHO-$$$ for marketing purposes. Last year Intel gave out $300 million to the likes of Toshiba and Dell to market their Centrino laptops I would not be at all surprised if it turned out that it was CHEAPER to add in an Intel WiFi chip than to have no wifi chip at all once you factor in the advertising bonuses. So that $12 Broadcom chip could well be $14 or $15 more expensive than an Intel one.
Nope, not elitism.
Linux is just easier to play around IN for people who like to do that sort of thing. Windows, being closed-source makes it much harder.
And as far as Microsoft making you productive immediately, check out the Knoppix project; it boots off a CD, and puts you in a graphical environment with a lot of quality apps instantly, even faster than installing Windows.
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
If you want to stick with Dell hardware, you have another option: you could order a TrueMobile 1150 miniPCI from Dell spare parts. Last I checked it was about $50. It's based on the Orinoco chipset, probably the most completely supported chipset under Linux.
No matter how you put it, what drivers are available, or how much hype Intel has put in it, the Centrino still sucks. The Wireless LAN card moreso than the Pentium M. I am perfectly happy with my Dell TrueMobile 1300 with 802.11b/g support. Takes about the same amount of power as the Centrino, but with g support to boot.
-Kids in the back seat causes accidents.- -Accidents in the back seat causes kids.-
that people will buy it, specifically BECAUSE it has 'Win' in front of it - it must work with Windows, right? hey, and its cheaper than YOUR weird 'non-Win' version. And I get $300 off the price of my system if I buy MSN for 3 years. And ... ooh, a shiny thing!
Face it, people are sheep. I can only take comfort in that they'll inherit the world that they're demanding.
When the last computer geek is out of a job, when the last hardware modem is sold, when the last packet is sent unfiltered, all in the name of 'rapid application deployment', or 'security' or 'cost-effectiveness', the sheeple will have nobody to turn to. The magnitude of their folly will be revealed to them in a blinding flash, and at last the devices of their enemies will be laid bare. And there will be nobody to save them.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
I've been dealing with this kind of stupidity ever since I tried to get an X server for my little 150Mhz IBM Thinkpad back in 1997.
The Thinkpad had an early NeoMagic video chipset. Neomagic wouldn't release the programming specs or a binary only driver. I was really pissed that the X people couldn't get the neccessary info to program the device. I even called Lou Gerstner's 'talk to the CEO' hotline. Gerstner's office called IBM Japan who called Neomagic who said "no". Since I'm an early adopter and IBM wasn't completely on the Linux bandwagon IBM didn't push back too hard.
To a large extent the only people you could get a driver from was X-Inside. That was $150 and cost a lot more than my entire OS. ($150 more to be exact). But I *really* wanted that and I paid the price.
As far as I can tell there are only a few explanations of this stupidity.
1. They are really afraid of the Chinese government assissted reverse engineers (or AMD's) copying their design overnight. Patents don't help much in China. If that's the case then what is the difference between a linux binary release and a winxp binary release? They could both be disassembled overnight by experienced engineers. In fact I was willing to do that work for the XFree86 group back in 1997 using SoftIce but they are a snooty bunch so I didn't bother.
Could it be that Win2K/2K3 and XP have mechanisms in them for slowing down reverse engineering. If that's true it may be the crucial difference. Many companies like Intel, AMD Etc know that the Chinese are going to copy their designs rapidly so they work with the accountants closely to compute the revenue stream from some piece of IP. If they can slow down the Chinese by even 3 to 5 months that may significantly increase their revenue.
I don't buy the excuse from Intel that they don't have the resources to do a linux release. That dog don't hunt. That have vast resources and they have used them to support Linux in the past.
2. They bought the FUD from MS about their drivers and thus their design being GPL'd because they interface to a GPL'd OS. Doubtful.
3. MS doesn't care as much if they help on the server side, but on the desktop/laptop they are probably under huge pressure from MS to inhibit Linux desktop adoption. Notice that they *have* released open source drivers to their etherpro100 network cards, but then those cards have the smarts inside, not in the software. Centrino's are a lot more like windmodems and we all know how long it took to get winmodem sources.
4. or Intel is being heavily squeezed in the market by AMD right now and the AVP's are really putting pressure on the departments to cut costs, move jobs to Bangalore etc. That means additional money spent developing drivers for Linux when linux hasn't exactly seen huge adoption on the desktop yet. I suspect this situation will change significantly this year (just started using Debian last month and *wow* -- good pick for UserLinux) and then Intel will be knocking down the doors to provide binary drivers. Intel may be persnickity about these kinds of things, but hardly anyone will turn aware money when it's on the table.
I'm not sure which of the above explanations make any sense. I think if there was more money to be made and less risk from angering MS they would have already done it.
Keep at it, it looks like the NDIS drivers are the short term solution.
If you want people to buy your HARDWARE to run their SOFTWARE you supply the appropriate DRIVER. And for high-end equipment Linux has more than enough market share at this point to justify Intel releasing a driver. At the very least, they should release the specs so the Linux crowd can develop one for them. This intellectual property buzz is likely nothing more than a sop to Microsoft, who wants to be first to support the latest, greatest processor and leave Linux out in the cold for a while.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Cool. Thankye.
I had thought all TrueMobile chips were Broadcom....
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
So, then, the way to go is security through obscurity? I thought this crowd hated that. :)
(I'm not saying you're advocating this; just that you're saying that that's what Intel is up to.)
Before you buy an Apple laptop (specifically the iBook series), do a search for "ibook logicboard". You'll find that there are some serious design flaws with this series. I bought an iBook in July 2002. I loved it. It ran both OS X and Gentoo very well. This past December I suffered my first logicboard failure. I am now the proud owner of a $1600 paperweight. This seems to be the norm rather than the exception (it's apparently present in the G4 line as well).
More links concerning to poor quality of Apple laptops:
Blackcider
Apple Discussions
Guess what?
You're in the minority.
Supporting the minority doesn't provide much profit.
Developing Linux support costs money.
Intel won't make much money pandering to the minority.
Soooo... In all likelihood, the cost of developing Linux support for Centrino would be greater than any profit from Linux users buying Centrino-based products.
So go ahead, don't buy a Centrino-based laptop. Nobody cares, least of all Intel.
Hard to say what the size of the worldwide Linux community is, but I know that at least 10 of my Windows admin/tech friends at least have a dual boot environment or use Linux withing a virtual machine. *And* I have already steered away three friends from Centrino chipsets primarily because of the driver issue.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
a) the wlan problem, but this one can be bypassed
with a different wlan card.
ndiswrapper/driverloader are not really a solution at least driverloader is not very stable and in case of 2.6 preemption can take the whole kernel down.
b) the bigger one is the one of non standard resolutions on the integrated 855 chipset.
The Xfree people are really banging their head against Intel in this case.
the problem is that certain notebook computers use non vesa resolutions like 1400x1050 the problem now is that the notebook providers dont provide bios switches to those resolutions and
intel is holding back the specs on how to switch to these resolutions.
The Accelerated X server from Xig works but has problems with XV on this chipset and OpenGL of AcceleratedX is also a tad problematic.
Basically the notebook vendors just say, we support only Windows and Intel just says it is up to the notebook vendors to add the appropriate resolutions to the bios.
Notebooks I know of which are affected of this problems are several models from Acer and Toshiba.
Intel's idea for this Centrino software and nVidia's binary-only driver delivers dependence, not software freedom. So long as you focus on "open source" you are choosing a philosophy that stresses picking technically better software and eschewing software freedom. This means when there is a proprietary program that is better than the "open source" equivalent, you have no reason to reject the proprietary program. So the open source movement actually does a good job of giving you reasons to reject the software they are endorsing. But don't take my word for it:
David Kastrup posted an insightful addition to this point--depending on the program we're talking about, there might not be an "open source" equivalent at all. In a recent thread on gnu.misc.discuss, I summarized some of the differences between the free software and open source movements and how the open source movement has a built-in problem that the free software movement doesn't have (namely, that pitching practical advantage isn't always telling the truth). Kastrup followed up to my post noting the following here:
I strongly encourage you to include support from free software as a criterion for choosing hardware. There are plenty of perfectly fine video cards and wireless devices that can be operated completely with free software. If you haven't already, I also encourage you to reevaluate siding with a movement that discourages paying attention to software freedom.
Digital Citizen
I would assume, for the wireless card, its to avoid access to the 802.11 MAC Layer. They probably also cant legally allow access to the radio; FCC prohibits the use of equipment in that band that has a radiating output of more than 100mW. Its the same reason we dont have Atheros drivers- you can bump up your output levels since most functions of the card are controlled by the driver, not the firmware. Atheros at least released a binary HAL with some of those values hardcoded so we could at least get wifi access in linux with their cards.
Based on their (lack of) responsiveness so far, I would not recommend them. I have switched to using the madwifi driver (with a different wireless card).
Owners of IBM Thinkpad X31's (and perhaps other IBMs, too; I don't know) cannot use this solution without a BIOS upgrade.
2 .2/0147.html for a more complete explanation)
The reason is, IBM's BIOS actually checks that the Mini-PCI wireless card is one of several "acceptable" cards, and will refuse to boot if it is not. The acceptable ones are the Intel Centrino card, and a a Cisco card. With a BIOS upgrade, apparently an IBM sourced Atheros-based card (model number 31P9701) will work. (see http://www.ussg.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/031
-- -pjk Perry Kundert perry@kundert.ca http://kundert.2y.net
> which is not a concern of the manufacturer.
Since when has governmental oversight/regulation/penalties/b *not* been a concern of "the manufacturer"?? You assume they live in a legal vacum, or what?
I don't really buy this. I've worked with 900 MHz and 2.4 GHz software controlled radio chipsets from both Chipcon and Rockwell. Nobody ever does any background check on me or anything. Nobody has ever made me sign something saying I won't program it to interfere with other equipment. Nobody has ever said they would need to audit any firmware/software I wrote for it. Nobody has ever even charged me for a dev kit. They throw a dev kit at me, and say "Have fun!"
Granted, these are the chipsets all by themselves, and not something a typical user could do anything with except fry with static.
And of course, my final products have to meet the specs in order to get FCC approval. But did you know that the firmware on the unit which the FCC tests doesn't have to be the same firmware shipped in production units! In fact, it's common practice to give the FCC testing labs special testing firmware. It doesn't even need to be fully functional. All it needs to do is the unit's "primary function." For instance, there are many handheld radio transmitters with keypads out there. Keypad scanning circuits tend to be really noisy, espcially on some microcontrollers. So you have special test firmware that starts transmitting when you press a key, and stops scanning the keyboard once you press that key. The FCC tester doesn't start measuring the emissions until the device it transmitting (it's "primary function"). Since the keypad has stopped scanning, it's no longer generating that noise and passes the test. Yes, the FCC tester is fully aware that they using "test-only" firmware!
it's not like making closed source drivers for the linux kernel is hard, you basically make code that will use a static object file and call from it and include it, etc...
so, what's taking them so long?
Simpler solution than that:
Give your money to a company that makes laptops that DO support your OS of choice.
Some say it doesnt matter because Intel doesnt care about 5% of the users that would use this for linux, but I say if thats one less ivory back scratcher for someone at intel, all the better!
Has there been any news if their driver will support the 802.11B part or the B.G part or what?
Larger? Probably a bit, which is a pain when laying out complex, multi-layered PCB's, but more power? I venture to say the power required to push the driver through the proc instead of a standalone CPU would be greater.
That's what it seems to me, but that may not be factual.
-What have you contributed lately?
Hardware companies seem to have no problem donating to OSDL to get free as in beer code to run on their hardware. But the minute their asked to reveal some IP of their own, the answer is no way. When will Linux programmers realize they are being exploited by hardware companies for their own ends.
To ask a possibly flamebaitish question or not...hrm...well I don't know the answer so here goes, take it as you will.
Why are the centrino's clock speeds considerably slower than many other CPU's around?
What are the benefits of that, does a 1.5ghz pentium M run faster than this 2ghz celeron laptop? Are the clock ratings fairly irrelevant? I can see it'd need less cooling, but 2ghz laptops are pretty small and seem to cool themselves OK, what gives, all marketing?
Oh wait, why am I not modded up? I guess your inclinations are incorrect.
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
Like this one. Best Buy sells them for $1299 after rebates. They're getting some mentions on the Fedora Test List. It's amazing how much hardware you can get for semi-cheap when you're not paying the Centrino marketing tax. Besides, 32-bit CPUs are so last century.
Though you'll still need a NDIS wrapper to get the Broadcom 802.11g chip to work, or beat Broadcom with cluebats until they cough up the Linux driver they've apparently already written. Darn.
I'm going to stick with my desktop for now, but if I come up with an excuse to buy a notebook that's what I'll get.
They can't afford to hire an engineer for a year for, let's say, $100K, to do this? Actually, though I hate to admit, this would be a perfect project for outsourcing, since the specification should be extremely clear.
The real problem, I'd bet, is the corporate beauracracy. Even if this project should only take one man-year, they'd have to hire a project leader, lead engineer, QA engineer and technical writer. Then the four of them would spend at least half of each day in meetings arguing ("constructive confrontation"), so that the project would take two years.
For all we know, this could already be happening.
You're hinting at the right answer to questions like this: the market.
I'm going to be in the market for wireless home network gear this Summer, and OS-agnostic hardware is certainly a requirement.
When the market quits acting like a heard of sheep, the companies will put down the shears.
Oops! Fantasizing in public again! Sorry...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
You should probably research this yourself, but the pentium m is a hybrid pentium iii/4 with a 1 MB l2 cache, it is considered to run at 40% faster than it's clock speed in pentium 4 terms.
So your 1.5ghz pentium m runs about as fast as a 2.2ghz pentium 4, depending on what you are doing with it of course.
Much of this regulation is acheived through the close-source drivers. Using modified drivers, it would be possible to make the card emit different frequencies or more power, thereby violating the usage licence.
Wrong. Any driver can be modified, whether closed source or not, to tweak the radio output. Closed source drivers are not at all how FCC regulation is achieved. This should be inherently obvious to the casual observer. In similar fashion, I could make my garage door opener fail to meet FCC regulation with some parts from radio shack. But if I do, I'm the one in violation, not the original manufacturer.
In reality what happens is the manufacturers document their wireless hardware and then the Linux/BSD wlan projects implement drivers. Yes, it just so happens that some hardware can be told through software to perform outside of FCC regulations. The default settings used by the open source drivers, of course, do not cause output violations.
Now, of course, the really interesting thing is when you get into designing your own antennas and tweaking the hardware to be just barely within legal limits. Similar to overclocking, a lot of wireless hardware has a significant "safety margin". Don't try this at home unless you know what you doing. (-:
Maybe it is because I'm not a market droid, but what good is a product to a company when they are too afraid to sell it?
...prying $20 from your thin wallet to buy Linuxant's DriverLoader
Man, that's a pretty strange wallet if you can afford a centrino wireless device but you can't scrape up $20. Small businesses must have an impossible time trying to sell software on the Internet. Have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich one night instead of ROTK again. If I had centrino wireless (and I came really close having bought a T30 a few weeks before the T40s) I would be delighted to pay $20. It beats bying the Cisco mini-pci module which I believe is the only alternative for the T40.
The upshot is that the battery life is effectively halved, and with no sleep capability that's a real pain. Swsusp is not ready for prime time, and anyhow it takes longer than it should.
I like the Vaio line, but given the opportunity for another purchase I would steer FAR away from Scumtrino.
And to add to that, I've got that Dell card to accept the HostAP driver ;-)
It also seems to be a bit stronger strength than the standard Orinoco cards too... I can get a 1 Mbit strength through a 3 feet stone/concrete wall (or 2x the distance around the hallway). The other cards I have cant do that..
I concur. I bought a Dell Latitude laptop last year. Right out of the box, the screen was dead. They sent someone out to replace the mobo (video card was built-in). Repair person bent mobo #2's pins, had to come back the next day with mobo #3. Three months later, the hard disk dies. Support person thinks I might need to upgrade my BIOS, which obviously fixes nothing. They sent a new hard disk (which I had to install my self) and all my data on my old hard disk is forever lost..
cpeterso
A better solution is buying a Taiwan-i886 laptop with a Chinese WiFi.
No, sir, as long as you don't disclose the specs, and there is an open source driver, I am not going to a) take your Linux efforts seriously and b) buy any Centrino hardware. There's alternatives, forget?
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
The radio is horrable. Many venders are dropping in Broadcom radio's as a solution to Centrino's poor performance.
So really, who cares?
Actually, I have it from an inside source that the centrino engineers are leaving INTEL. The group in Pheonix is fed up because of the Top brass are insisting on using an a highly variable in house digital fab process (to keep the designs from falling into the wrong hands) for their analog radio production. This results in miserable yeilds (30%). And will result in the failure of the product in the eyes of the engineers.
The message is clear. Intel doesn't know analog. Intel doesn't know consumer electronics. Intel is psychotically paranoid about intellectual property.
YellowTab's Zeta (the successor to BeOS) has Centrino drivers which just work. Sometimes, closed source can be beneficial...
Revolution = Evolution
Totally off-topic, but I really worry about them.
Have you ever actually used anything with a Transmeta in it?
I think that until a native VLIW version of Linux get's ported, it will forever just be a big loser.
I own a Fujitsu P2040 with a Crusoe at 867mhz-
It is a lovely laptop with the exception of it being a *total* dog.
To give you an idea, Win2k/XP runs "alright" on it.
IE is "barely fast enough" for use.
Netscape/Mozilla/Firebird under Win32 or Linux is too slow to be usable.
Under Linux, KDE and GNOME are just too much- app launch time is in some cases just ridiculous.
The only way I've got it to a usable state is with Fluxbox, Opera7, and Textmaker- (Openoffice is as you can imagine a dog)
Contrast this to their new P-series- the P5000-
This uses a Pentium-M at 1ghz, and just fucking flies.
My only experience with it is so far WinXP-only, but it *really* hauls ass.
IE and stuff are *instantaneous*.
Even WMP9 fired up with only the *slightest* delay.
And that's what makes me sad- with a VLIW-native Linux port I'm sure the Crusoe would perform rather well, but as long as their philosophy continues (as it has in the Sony devices you mention) I think they'll always be several steps behind...
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
I have a Compaq Evo N160, and it also lacks APM in the BIOS... is an ACPI only box... (ok, lapbox!)
with kernel 2.4 the only trick is to pass pci=noacpi in grub (or lilo) to the kernel, and I'm as happy as can I be: software suspend, proper shutdown, speedstep, battery monitoring....
Using 2.4.22 as it comes in mdk9.2, but it worked fine in the mdk9.1 kernels (2.4.21 I think?). Should be no problem with recent distributions, on compiling your kernel...
with kernel 2.6, no nasty kernel switches !!! Now if only the atmelwan and vmware drivers compiled...
Should give a try.
Gerry -- #include "ea!.h"
I bought one yesterday. I'm planning to put fedora on it and try out the NDIS wrapper. I'll let ya'll know how it works. (review, maybe?)
Not flamebaitish at all, it's actually a very good question.
First off, a 1.5GHz Pentium M will run circles around a 2.0GHz Celeron. Actually it will beat the pants off a 2.8GHz Celeron, but the Celeron is perhaps a bad example because that chip REALLY stinks! The current Celerons (1.7GHz through to 2.8GHz, basically a castrated bastard-child of the regular Pentium4) are absolutely abysmal performers, so it doesn't take much to beat them; AMD's $35 Duron processors running at 1.6GHz will usually match or beat the 2.8GHz Celeron.
Simply put, there are two main methods of designing a fast processor; the "brainiac" model where the chip does a lot of work per clock cycle but doesn't clock as high, and the "speed demon", which doesn't do much per clock cycle but runs at very high clock speeds.
The Pentium4 is very much a "speed demon" design, which is why it clocks nearly twice as high as most other chip produced on a similar manufacturing technology. The Pentium-M takes more of the "brainiac" style of design, so it's harder for Intel to clock it to high speeds, but it does more work per clock cycle.
In reality, the Pentium M doesn't really run at slower clock speeds than many other CPUs, it currently tops out at 1.7GHz. For comparison the Athlon64 is running at 2.2GHz, the PPC 970 (aka G5) at 2.0GHz, the Power4+ at 1.7GHz, the Itanium2 at 1.5GHz, Alpha EV7 at 1.25GHz, UltraSparc III at 1.2GHz, etc. Really the only odd-ball is the Pentium4, which currently clocks up to 3.2GHz. Despite the wide range in clock speed though, in the end all of these chips are in the same general ball-park in terms of performance.
Now, there are a LOT of factors that influence the overall speed of a processor, and even a quick summary of them could easily take dozens of pages, but it's already well documented in books and on the web if you're interested. Suffice it to say that a Pentium-M is usually about as fast as a 2.2 to 2.6GHz P4, though individual applications can vary wildly.
This doesn't exactly mean that clock speeds are irrelevant, a 1.7GHz Pentium-M is still going to be faster than a 1.3GHz Pentium-M, it's just that clock speed is only one small part of the whole picture. I like to equate it to the displacement of a engine. All else being equal, a 4.0L engine will give you a faster car than a 3.0L engine. However, it's certainly possible to build a 3.0L engine that will produce more horsepower than a totally different design of 4.0L engine (F1 cars manage to pump ~900bhp out of a 3.0L engine, while most 4.0L engines you're likely to see in production cars produce only ~300bhp). What's more, the peak horsepower number doesn't tell the full picture of engine performance and it certainly doesn't tell you how fast the car as a whole would be. Similarly, for any given processor core, higher clock speeds will give you more performance. On the other hand, two different cores can haver very different performance at different clock speeds, and certainly other components like the video cards, memory and hard drive can all have a big impact on the overall performance of the system.
When you get down to it, it's simply a matter of design decisions and trade-offs. The Pentium-M was designed to offer good performance and low power, and it succeeds VERY well (I'm a big fan of the Pentium-M processor, even if I rather dislike the "Centrino" marketing program). The P4 was designed for the highest overall performance at a reasonable price-point. As a result, the top-end P4s are faster than the top-end Pentium-M chips, and probably always will be. However, the Pentium-M at 1.7GHz consumes only about 25W. A similar performance P4, even in it's low-power laptop version (the "Mobile Pentium4-M", not to be confused with either the "Mobile Pentium-M" or the "Mobile Pentium4", and some people say AMD's names are confusing!) consumes 35W at 2.5GHz. Meanwhile the regular desktop Pentium4 (and also the "Mobile Pentium4") conume 61W. That 2.0GHz mobile Celeron processor you mentioned comes in at 32W.
The license for the kernel says so (se #8097617).
There are more than 7,000 signments of the Intel Support of Centrino Under Linux and the number is still increasing. Also Centrino laptops are already very popular among Linux geeks, see these Linux installation reports on Centrino laptops and notebooks.
Sorry, but being an Intel engineer actually working on this product, I can safely say that you sir are talking out of your ass and have no idea of what you are talking about.
Go to source forge and get MadWifi drivers and buy Linux friendly hardware. Vendors like Broadcom are Linux unfriendly. Prism is Linux friendly.
If we tell the vendors we don't run windows, and what of yours works with Linux, and only buy Linux friendly you can run both. They will comply.
http://swsusp.sourceforge.net/index.html
:)
:)
It's the stable implementation on the 2.4 kernel series. It also works for 2.6. There's a detailed howto...
Use the latest version, I've had no problems with it. Basically, try with a small system partition and , if posible two swap partitions, one of them larger that your RAM. You could use the mandrake partition manager to get some space back from XP and install this. OR Partition magic, if you have that available to you.
install a basic system with almost no apps, but the gcc compiler, XFree86 server, sound drivers, net card, etc. Try this thing, and if it works, THEN you can install apps over it or maybe reinstall with a bigger partition. If it doesn't work, just scrap it and wait for it on distro. Even if useful, I reckon we all have better things to do than fight our OS's
anyway, backups are GOOD for you, specially if by mistake you manage to wipe out your partition table
Gerry -- #include "ea!.h"
IIRC, compiling into the kernel or as a module isn't all that different w.r.t. licensing. They are (probably) allowed to do so by the GPL since they didn't mix their proprietary code with GPL code, you did, and since you don't distribute the final result, neither GPL nor anybody cares.