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Intel Releases Linux Driver For Centrino WLAN
Werner Heuser writes "Finally Intel has made their different announcements about
Linux support for the WLAN part of the Centrino technology
become true. Though not yet officially announced
an Open-Source driver with included firmware
is available at SourceForge.
The driver is still experimental and supposed to work
with 2.4 Kernels as well as with 2.6 ones." (See these previous stories for some background.)
The Army reading list
Is this a full driver or is the firmware a subtle way of making a closed-source driver?
(Honest question)
Posters recognized by their sig,
Do not encourage the use of NDISWRAPPER! Someone will probably moderate this as Troll, but come on - we all know that having such a "fallback option" makes the hardware makers relax more when it comes to releasing natively running, opensource Linux drivers!
broadcom would follow intel's lead and release a linux driver. while driverloader and ndiswrapper work, it would be nice to see the hardware vendor stop making crappy excuses (fcc regulations other stupid ones) about releasing a linux driver.
I think the same... big hardware companies are changing the way they see Linux community and the computer market at all. Everyday we are more and more and more!!!
(I feel as the Agent Smith a little... he he he)
And building their own driver.
Like the eepro100 driver from before? Or those Texas Instruments wireless chipsets in the DLink 650+? And a whole mess of other drivers for other devices from hardware companies that won't release technical specifications. Heck, are Broadcom 11g drivers out yet?
Doing the Right Thing should not be preempted by making a buck.
Read the copyright on the source code, and look at the contact info posted on the sf site. It's intel. (Hint: "Copyright 2003 - 2004 Intel Corporation" and the contact is jketreno AT linux.intel.com)
:-)
Just because they aren't loudly tooting their own horn by splashing "intel" all over the sf.net website doesn't mean they're not helping/having their people do the work. What you saw simply means they haven't been able to work out how to get the HW docs out the door to the community, and are being candid about this in the first sentence of their page.
And shame on you for making bad assumptions about helpful people, and unfairly criticizing an accurate news article.
I suppose I may have been trolled here, and I hate to bite, but this needs to be corrected
.sig: file not found
...I'm curious why it took so long for this to finally happen. Intel knew, for a long time, that there was extensive interest.
The Centrino is a good chipset, and Centrino-based laptops are fairly popular. Even without the wireless support, I've been happy using a Linux-based Centrino laptop for the last six months. The lack of wireless access was the one thing that had been sticking in my craw.
Now, I'll be able to unequivocally recommend these laptops to friends who use Linux. This will mean more sales for Intel. This, I would think, would be considered a Good Thing (tm). So why the wait?
Anyone know if this implementation uses wireless extensions? Will these drivers use iwconfig and the rest of wireless tool or will you have to use some proprietary intel (probably binary only) tools? If it doesnt use wireless extensions, all of the neat scripts that come with stock distributions (debian, redhat, etc) wont work without some modification.
But for them to relax more they'd have to be working on something in the first place, most of the hardware makers that are willing to support linux are gonna do it with the best drivers they can, not have people running their software in linux with some little hack. And the ones that don't support linux don't care that some little app lets people run windows drivers, they weren't going to support linux anyway it's not worth it for them. If NDISWRAPPER works then people should use it, I know I'd deffinitely use it if it supports my laptops network card (haven't been able to get this thing to work at all, some fairly old lucent technologies wireless card, I think there is support for some newer version of this card but not mine.) I'd use a newer card with linux support but the laptop itself doesn't support these (dunno why, tried some netgear card it didn't like that very much I think the PCMCIA slot in my laptop is 16 bit or something like that it's an old laptop.)
Absolutely. I believe Prism have a much better attitude to open source developers. Why not support them?
Stupid excuses like "this cost us millions to produce, so we're not going to give the code away to you and our competitors, which would eventually cause us to lose so much revenue we'd not be able to make any more cards/drivers for you at all"?
...this shames the NVidias and ...
Well, nVidia has a good reason - they use proprietary algorithms lisenced from companies who makes them for a living. Their lisence disallows them from releasing the source. Thus, it is not a stupid excuse. Their hands are really tied. Intel also had some completely valid concerns that an Open-Source driver would allow their chip to tune to frequencies out of the legal WLAN band, and at signal strengths way higher than the legal limit, to name a few.
Luckily, Intel (justly IMO) judged that the competitive advantages of Linux support outweighed those risks.
-tsb
toresbe
Thats really nice the released for linux, but how about us FBSD folks.. or are we out of luck on this one...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
This is no first step, it's the begining of the end of many steps Intel has taken forth with it's centrino *line.* The only remaining piece was the WLAN component they have already facilitated the release of the speed stepping and other integrated components.
Wintel isn't ALWAYS the badguy.
NOW, I can say THANK GOODNESS no more lockups in Fedora from DriverLoader BS, now my only question is how will they allow Linux users to flash their firmware when the manufacturers don't provide floppy drives on most of the Centrino lines.
I'm gonna be able to build a sweet linux computer!
This is something i don't understand. In India and many parts of Asia, due to duty structures (computer parts have lesser taxes than fully assembled systems etc) and due to proximity to china, it is cheaper to build your own computer than to buy it pre-built. So I have built all my computers myself - buying RAM from one shop and video cards from another.
My computer had an Intel i810 mobo when they just came out. They had reasonably bad Linux support(video would not work with Linuxes avbl. then) , this was in 99 I think.
But after that I have built myself atleast 3 computers, 1 intel and 2 AMD , and Redhat has worked straight out of the box. This is inspite of me buying the cheapest mobos available, with integrated everything, or going for the absolutely latest on others. On the otherhand, until I put in the manufacturer provided binary drivers, windows support has always been bad - No SVGA, no network etc.
Ofcourse, it might have something to do with the fact that sometimes I can put up with non-spectacular video performance (when I get totally bored reconfiguring XFree86 ), but still Linux supports more machines out of the box than windows from what I have seen- assuming that each different motherboard/cards etc are given equal weightage irrespective of how many of them get sold.
The experience is not different for myy friends either.
This is a great argument - except for one thing. Why can't they release all of their code? If there is somebody else's code in there that has to be binary only why can't THOSE be the parts that are binary only? A couple of ".o" files in a mass of ".c" files named "sgi.o", "ms.o", "sun.o", etc to hide the non-disclosable binary bits. At the very least the bugs in the rest of it could be hunted down and squashed. It's just an excuse, they don't want to release it. I'd rather they said so than blame it on some other company.
Carpe Daemon
Actually, I've found the nvidia driver to be MUCH faster, even in KDE, than nv. Maybe it's because I've got an old slow box (PMMX233), and the acceleration seems to speed it up a big deal... I installed the drivers because 1fps in BZFlag wasn't my cup of tea.
the article mentions Firmware but i suspect it is similar to some USB ADSL modems: the firmware is routinely uploaded by the driver during init. I doubt this means the firmware needs to be updated to *support* Linux (do you remember ever flashing any hardware's BIOS to run Linx?), the Windows driver probably does the same thing.
Wow now this is interesting. Intel have decided that they're going to call on the massive contingent of Open Source developers for their Linux driver. This benefits them because they don't have to hire programmers or support the drivers and can outsource it to the community at large who will maintain it.
Better:
They open-sourced the driver proper, only keeping the firmware closed.
They're providing starter code and a contact guy who can look provide enough help with the proprietary stuff that the community doesn't need to worry about getting hung due to inaccessable info.
Short of opening the firmware this like the best support model yet.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way