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.)

Comments

This is a great sign

[KingOfBLASH]

I can remember the day when I could only get spotty support for most hardware on my Linux box. Buying a computer was complicated if I wanted to use Linux -- I might only have one or two choices for a component (i.e. soundcard) because the drivers came from the community. This is a great sign, if Intel starts supporting all of their products under Linux, other vendors will follow suit, and it won't be long before you'll see Lindows boxes alongside the Macs at CompUSA!

Stealing Windows Driver

[darkmeridian]

I use ndiswrapper with my Truemobile 1400 card with gentoo. (Sorry. Had to say it. :P)

ndiswrapper 0.5 is absolutely great. It automagically installs using the windriver.inf file and autoloads. Downloads at >500 kb/s sustained. Does not crash.

I wonder if there can be more projects like this one that essentially steal windows drivers and puts them onto linux. There should be more unified driver APIs like ndis out there, right? I wonder if we can get rid of winmodems using wrappers.

On a sidenote, the Cisco VPN client 4.0 hangs on 2.6.3. It works if you switch to a new console. No one knows how to fix it yet. I was using the anomalistic patch, but nothing yet. I guess I have to backpatch the kernel. Yuck.

Re:NDISWRAPPER (small warning)

[0biJon]

If you have the Prism Chipset you should head to http://prism54.org
There's a working linux driver and lots of support. However, it's still VERY experimental and can be tough to get working... but it does work.