Slashdot Mirror
State of WLAN Support on Linux?
ntropic asks: "I/ve recently bought a Belkin 802.11G USB adapter and was dismayed to find, after a few hours of struggling with it, that there seems to be no one who has managed to get it working under Linux. During the search for clues, it seemed that sum total of Linux support for wireless networking are the linux-wlan project, and the linuxant wrappers for Windows drivers. The former seems to support only Prism chipsets while the latter is a commercial solution, albeit quite an inexpensive one. Is that all, or are there better sources for wireless networking support?"
http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ Lets you use original Windows drivers on linux. Not pretty, but it works pretty well. Meanwhile, blame manufacturers.
What about ndiswrapper? Have you tried that yet? Some distros have ndiswrapper built/shipped with them. (SUSE does, IIRC) You'll have particular issues with wireless cards that use Broadcom chipsets - Broadcom won't release info about the chipset to any open-source groups. However, if you can get your hands on and can compile ndiswrapper for your machine, it should work well. Ndiswrapper has come a long way since I first tried it, and it's the only way I can use the Broadcom AirFoce 54g on my Acer laptop.
I've used the Linuxant software in the past when ndiswrapper failed me. The support was excellent and they support almost any wireless device you can think of. $20 isn't bad either, for a lifetime license....
As far as the "state of WLAN support", blame the people who build the chipsets (Broadcom, et al) and market forces. If they were willing to either open up the necessary information to linux developers or have their own coders write drivers for linux we'd not have this problem. Of course, if Linux had greater marketshare, we'd probably see more linux drivers as well. This argument goes for most hardware and linux in general, though....
My MythTV HowTo
Yeah, I had a similar disenchanting experience with USB Wi-Fi adapters on Linux. Eventually gave up on the project and just put Windows on the box.
As long as you don't need WPA, get a card with an rt2x00 series chip. The drivers work fine, though they are not yet good enough to be merged into the kernel. http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/
The last time I did research on this subject, I found the ndiswrapper, which seems to work ok with my linksys 54g pcmcia adapter. Ndiswrapper is open source and works great from my experience.
Funny, my ThinkPad with Intel (gag!) wireless seems to work flawlessly. The main kernel tree drivers are still a bit flaky, but the ipw2200 drivers are rock-solid.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
Manufacturer won't release information on hardware. So the only way to find out how to interface with it is to reverse engineer the windows driver, a tedious enterprise. If it's really an issue, return the product and tell the retailer why it is being returned. Enough people doing that, the manfacturer will have to bend if it wants the business.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
Clunk click.
Found my highly generic Atmel chip set WLAN card (USB), configured instantly, on-line in less than 3 minutes from inserting the card.
Kubuntu and Knoppix both failed totally.
Steve
Not sure what chipset your wireless card uses, but if it's Broadcom, there are 2 solutions now. 1) http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ lets you use Windows drivers on Linux. 2) http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ the native Broadcom driver is stabilizing now. It's experimental at this state, but people are using it on both x86 and ppc. I think you have to have a 2.6.15 or later kernel to use that though. I'm still using ndiswrapper for mine, it works okay until the native drivers are stabilized more.
Perhaps you should have found out the dismal support part before you purchased the adapter. Duh.
There's also this project:
:-)
http://prism54.org/
But be aware that it doesn't support WEP/WPA yet. The guy who's running the site says WEP/WPA is easy to add, so I'm puzzled as to why it's not in yet since it's really important for security
I think that many of the chipset makers are afraid of the legal liability that widespread software controllable radios could bring on. I'm actually suprised that some jackass hasn't been caught jamming police or airport radios.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
802.11g under linux is sort of a mess. Wireless cards are getting cheaper and cheaper (in terms of manufacturing) and much of this cheapness is cutting corners, taking more logic off the cards and putting it into software (drivers/firmware).
The vast majority of 802.11g cards out there are almost entirely controlled by software. The frequency, transmit power, etc. I believe the specs to this are all goverend by the FCC (in the US at least, I'm sure most other nations have their own governmental bodies governing what can and can't be done).
As such, opensource drivers are tough as you don't want anyone just modifying the code to change frequencies, up transmit power etc. Also, a number of manufacturers have used "competition" as their reason for keeping things closed.
As a result, the support out there is lumped into a few different chunks:
1) no drivers available
2) atheros drivers (contain a binary HAL object file. This allows them to have a small source component that people can build that links against the binary object which contains the routines to do the various things I mentioned above (basically control the card)
3) opensource driver + firmware (where the firmware component does what the HAL does, but since it's actual firmware loaded to the card, it allows the driver interface to be fully opensourced without revealing too much of what's going on. The intel and prism54 drivers are in this camp.
Basically, if you don't have a prism54 or intel based 802.11g card, you can't use open source drivers, and the drivers will never be included into the kernel because they can't be open sourced. Atheros was nice to release their stuff so that at least their cards are usable.
Every other manufacturer's card users need to hope that their mfg is nice enough to do what atheros does (or if their driver is firmware based, do what intel/intersil[or whoever owns the prism54 stuff now] did by either writing drivers, or helping with it.
It makes it tough if you don't know this ahead of time, but really with 802.11g, you just need to pick the right card and hope. Unfortunately none of this is really very well documented.
Try changing your card to monitor mode a few times. With the latest releases, the drivers may hang the system and block all keyboard input (mouse still seems to work), requiring a hard reboot. Oh yeah, and AirSnort doesn't seem to be able to identify weak IV packets with the current drivers.
mnemonic_
Well if you thought Wifi support was bad for Linux, you should see the level of Wifi support in OSX... Basically its non existant, unless you buy the hardware from Mac, which I find quite amazing considering OSX is Darwin / BSD...
. html however its $39 and it doesn't support much... I have 3 different USB Wireless dongles, and sadly none of them are supported!
Yes there is this driver add on http://www.orangeware.com/endusers/wirelessformac
My mini still has an ugly blue cable coming out its but, as I was so confident I didn't need to buy Apple's over priced wifi solution, hehe I had 3 different USB wireless dongles. BTW, all three of these dongles work great under Windows & Linux. Mike
Gamblers Forum
... to people who frequent this forum.
Personally, after dozens of attempted installations of 5 different distributions, I have **given up** on Linux. It's simply too difficult to make work with the variety of hardware I encounter.
Your experience sadly mimics my own. I certainly wish I didn't have to play Junior Systems-Integrator every time I wanted to install a powerful and sensible OS.
Instead, due to the this kind of thing, I'm forced to paying ransom for a less-than-ideal, but robustly easy to install "OS" from Redmond.
How I wish this wasn't so.
Absolutely untrue. Madwifi has support for a ton of b/g chipsets based on Atheros stuff. You can pick up a nice DLink DWL-520 for cheap, and it'll work great. (at least, that's what I think i picked up a few months ago... its something like that, at least).
I once had (long story short) several PCI cards that had Texas Instrument ACX100 chips and after a long time I stumbled upon the ACX100/ACX111 project on SourceForge (formerly the ACX100 project; they have grown since). They have a corresponding device list here and there.
Thib ;-)
My laptop uses an Intel chipset, which seems to be pretty well supported under Linux. The ipw2100 and ipw2200 drivers have both worked great for me.
In my desktop, I have an rt2500 which is supported under 32-bit Linux, but the 64-bit driver for Linux is extremely buggy. Ndiswrapper chokes hard on loading the 64-bit version for Windows, so I'm just connecting my ethernet port on that machine.
Other than the above, I have never had trouble getting drivers working with Ndiswrapper, so the current state of Linux WLAN isn't so bad if you include it.
By the way, Marvell are bastards. Don't buy their wireless chips. They're about as OSS friendly as Microsoft.
When will people learn to do it the other way around:
ask first, buy the good parts later.
There are plenty of projects going on to try to supply good drivers, but every time a good driver is ready for a great product the manufactureres have silently switched to a (cheaper) chipset.
Which one? The Belkin F5D7050 has GPL drivers from the chipset manufacturer for Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows.
http://ralink.rapla.net/
Or if it's an Atheros chipset check out http://madwifi.org/
You aparently didn't come across the biggest Linux wireless site that I know of.
n ux/
:)
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Li
The only wireless device that I haven't managed to make work is the Broadcom BM4306 that came with my HP zv6000. That's not a failure of the Linux drivers. There is a stupid soft button to enable the antenna, and no one has figured it out for this particular zv6000 subrevision. All my other wireless cards work fine in the PCMCIA/PCCARD slot.
As I've found, if all else fails, get a wireless bridge (like a Linksys WET54G), and plug it into your ethernet port. Sticking on one extra device is a lot easier than switching to Windows.
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Atmel and Realtek, I believe. With WLAN, you really have to check which chipset you get before buying. Avoid Broadcom, Prism54 (driver support is coming, but depends on reverse engineering). Here is a page with some recommendations.
Personally, I have an Asus WL-107 with Ralink rt2500 chipset (cardbus), which works acceptably, and a 3com with Prism54 that doesn't work. Beware of cards that change chipset from revision to revision.
Why hasn't anyone else linked to this chart which aims to be a complete list of wireless cards and what driver, if any, they're supported by under Linux?
:)
It's incredibly useful.
Personally, I've had bad luck playing with the bcm43xx driver a few weeks ago, and I've loved the new version of the ipw2200 [finally the 1.0.[78] bugs are gone!] and my rt2x00 card is a nice backup.
Also, ndiswrapper works fine, provided you use 1.8 if you're on a 64-bit system.
It's only an insult if it's not true.
Kerneltrap had an informative article on this. The short summary is that wireless support on Linux sucks, and that it is partially our own problem. A quote:
another banner year has passed, with Linux once again proving its superiority in the area of crappy wireless (WiFi) support. Linux oldsters love the current state of wireless, because it hearkens back to the heady days of Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik and Linux kernel 0.99, when getting hardware to work under Linux required either engineering knowledge or luck (or both).
Linux: Wireless State of the Union
I'm running an Atheros miniPCI card with the MadWifi Driver under Linux and haven't had any problems. I've also used Orinoco and Prism2 cards with Linux out of the box.
This is my sig.
Why don't you just write your own driver? I mean, it's not like you have a life, or a job, or even classes to attend. Everyone else gleefully looks forward to debugging code on poorly-documented (or undocumented) hardware released by manufacturers who really coudl care less about Linux support. Everyone else here is well-versed in C, C++, FORTRAN, COBOL, Pascal, Java, Perl, CGI, and Python. And just because the command line interface is byzantine and cryptic doesn't mean it's not appropriate for children, grandmas, and Linux newbies of all ages. After all, if you haven't memorized the entire vi command set, you're just not worthy of using Linux yet.
/. response to anyone who points out the elephant in the living room, namely that while Linux does lots of complex things very well, it's the easy things (or at least the things Windows makes look easy) that are turning off potential converts. After all, if even knowledgeable people have to wrestle for hours to get a damned USB device to install properly -- a device that will install flawless in under thirty seconds on a Windows machine -- just how many new users does Linux really expect to attract?
Now, the preceeding sarcasm has been brought to you by someone who uses Linux on a fairly regular basis and depends upon it to run more than a few servers in my enterprise. Yet I am consistently un-surprised at the typical
Are we really all satisfied with this level of user accomodation in Linux? It sure seems that way most of the time.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Installed SuSE10.0 some time ago on my ibm T43. ;-))
Eventhough i have no accesspoint my self, i detected at least three open networks.
Probably my neighbours or so.
Defining default gateway; and off i go!
No hacking, no drivers rebuilding or so, just another 5Mb effective for free..
So now i can download suse 10.1 on two machines at the same time
So long and tnx for the B.W.
The chipmakers...the dogwalkers whomever...but dont ask companies
like Novell and Redhat to spend a little bit of money to make wireless
networking actually work on linux. Dont ask the linux community to stop
putting in new whizbang features and get the existing features to actually
work as they are supposed to and dont you DARE question why wireless support
isnt part of the kernel instead of some extra add-on that gets ignored.
The 802.11 standard has been around since 1997, the 802.11a and b standards since 1999.
Even 802.11g is mainstream now and I still cant take my laptop to a hotspot turn it on
and it just work...
Flamebait all you want from the moderators reading this belonging to the pure gnu persusian but writing closed source drivers are tough for linux.
Blame the manufactors? Its the FCC that forces them to not give out details to hackers. Many other governments have similiar regulations on what hackers can and can not do to wireless. The government doesn't want people takign down airplanes are terrorists doing espianage on communication equipment.
So they must stay closed source if they are an American company. Many manufactors are now using software and creating win-wlan cards to save money. Remember what happened to linux after modem makers only made software modems? Samething with winprinters that make up the majority of printers today.
Under windows you write once and most likely the drivers will work with future versions of windows unless there is a major upgrade. That is because of NDIS and kernel and software level api's and device driver kits for windows.
We need a consistant and stable abi's and api's for linux so hardware makers can release the drivers for linux. Also old solaris drivers work just fine under solaris10 because of consistant api's and abi's.
I know VIA and several manufactors have requesting to Morton and Linus for this feature even though it divides then linux community.
http://saveie6.com/
The evaluation of an action as 'practical' . . . depends on what it is that one wishes to practice.
I have had quite a lot of success in getting wireless cards to work (by hook or by crook). I generally try to find native drivers and get them to work (download + compile + pray + break keyboard)... If that fails then I fall back to good old ndiswrapper.. (sometimes you need to tinker with it). But what I have always found to be a problem is: No manufacturer tells you what the hell the chipset is!!! You have to find that out by trial and error. My biggest mistake was to buy a USB WiFi adapter based on recommendation from a site... unfortunately the manufacturer had changed the chipset and I burnt myself... Anyway it is finally working with ndiswrapper now :-)
If you are simply using Linux because you don't like Microsoft products, you might want to have a wander into the *BSD camp and try out OpenBSD which has excellent wireless support* (see compatability list here - Belkin USB adapters are in there, but check the model number). OpenBSD is an extremely secure free operating system with most of the applications that you can find on a Linux distribution. If however it must be Linux, then try SuSE out - it may have the support you need.
* And excellent documentation, a brilliant firewall, a wonderfully clean code base, superb ports system and super sweet line of T-Shirts! =)
I got wireless G running on mac g3's to newer macs (non airport extreme card) x86's no problem but you have to be willing to spend a few minutes reading the hardware compatibility list. belkins, netgear,etc.
Much easier than dealing with windows unreliable wireless and OSX's airport only options...plus with powerbooks, laptops pcmcia reception much better. Not to mention when you have to install windows and then go hunt down the latest wireless drives, and install the 5 million and counting service packs.
but install windows. whatever works for you. its cool.
Support is very good.
There a a few Germans who have started to write a native driver.
Visit http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ to learn more about it.
I've found that it's entirely too much work to fsck around with drivers on every OS on each computer. Hardware bridges (often sold as "Gaming Adapters" to connect ethernet-enabled game consoles to a wireless network) kick butt. Set up the bridge once, get connectivity to every ethernet device in the room (or as far as you want to cable), and never have to mess with it again. Even saves time on windows boxen.
Belkin low-end wireless routers can bridge to each other. Motorola makes a decent bridge at a reasonable price.
Procrastination -- because good things come to those who wait.
1. Software piracy (Ahem)
2. Purchasing a computer that works well with Linux
3. Asking for help
Really, Arch Linux, although it's designed to be a simple text-based distro for the somewhat advanced user, just freaking works with most hardware. I don't like RPM-based distros, which is most of the popular ones. Ubuntu works for some people, not for me. You could try Libranet, I hear it's good. Check out distrowatch.com and read reviews on the top 20-30 distros, and see which one seems to fit.
Using an AMD based system seems to make Linux easier to get rolling. For me.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
KernelTrap recently reported on this: http://kerneltrap.org/node/6053
quidquid latine dictum sit altum videtur.
I had the same problem at first. I'd picked up a Netgear WG311v2 at Fry's and it took me *forever* to finally get my card working that first time. "Craig's ACX100/111 Guide for Linux" was extremely helpful if you've got hardware using this chipset. (I'd link to it, but don't want to slashdot them or anything.)
The driver was flaky, but functional. Now I've updated to the new driver at acx100.erley.org. Again, it took quite a bit of doing to get it working the first time (documentation for the new 2.6-only driver isn't as good yet), but now that I've gotten it working it's ROCK SOLID. It Just Works.
Well, as much as anything that required recompiling the kernel can Just Work, anyway.
It's basically the same story as with winmodems (no hardware specs), but the Linux community is further along in reverse-engineering because it's... well, it's WiFi, damn it, and not just an easily-upgraded internal modem.
Speaking of which, my brother can't get Linux to see his winmodem on his Compaq Presario laptop. Any pointers?
Graham "Teach" Mitchell, computer science teacher, Leander HS
That said, the state of Linux wireless networking today is similar to where its wired networking was say six or seven years ago -- a few solid drivers, a bunch of drivers that sorta work, and a bunch of drivers with promise but very experimental. When I bought a wireless card I took care to get one that I could find Linux native drivers for, an MSI US54G based on the Ralink RT2500 USB (RT2570) chipset. (The Ralink drivers are the basis of the rt2x00 project, which claims that the next-generation unified driver will do everything and make your coffee too, but last fall it was just getting to the point where you could associate to an AP). The situation is complicated by the fact that different versions of the same model card from the same manufacturer may have completely different chipsets -- not all Belkin F5D7050 adapters are Ralink-based like my wife's is. And even if you have the driver for the chipset, the device itself may be on a PCI ID the driver doesn't look for by default, necessitating a quick patch and recompile (I had to do this for my US54G to get the rt2570 driver to recognize it). Or the driver may not be preemption-safe, locking up your system when you up the interface unless you compile a custom version of the kernel without preemption enabled. There's a million niggly things you may run into, but most of them can be worked through or around in some way.
As time goes on, the good experimental drivers and the existing reliable drivers will develop full feature sets, the bad experimental drivers will be left in the dustbin, and it will become more common for manufacturers to follow Ralink's lead and open-source their drivers.
One reason for the lackluster support on many chips is that apparently US companies are bound by FCC regulations not to allow the TX power on their adapters to be boosted beyond a certain threshold, so e.g. Intel releases a Linux driver with a binary-only firmware file. If you look at the installation info for some wireless hardware (802.11a, I think) it will even say only FCC-certified installers can install the card in a host device (because of concerns about improper installation causing harmful interference). So there is a certain point beyond which manufacturers may never go and the community will have to reverse engineer if they want those drivers to be fully open-source (and said drivers may be illegal to use in the US or other places).
And if you want security on your network, oh boy, the fun you're going to have with wpa_supplicant (assuming it supports your card at all...)
-- Old Man Kensey
That's one thing that drove our decision to stick to IBM hardware: Linux support. http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/documen t.do?sitestyle=ibm&lndocid=MIGR-48NT8D
Research before you buy.
This is old old old hat. A synopsis of what will inevitably be posted follows;
'Google is your friend'
'Linux doesn't have to have bad or no drivers it's just the megapigopolists who don't spend time/money on writing drivers/opening their specs for a niche-category operating system [cue open/closed drivers debate again]'
'Just make sure you get one with [chipset name instead of an easily-obtainable brand & model name/number] '
'Mine are working ok, are you sure you enabled the --obscure-option flag when you compiled those drivers.'
'Real men rig up a pair of VHF radio's and implement their own physical networking layer.'
'[immature experimental distro] supports your brand of wireless interface, but isn't Ready For The Desktop yet.'
'Buy new hardware.'
Maybe the Linux community should try to make it easier for manufacturers. I fixed driver API might help. It's nice for hardware manufacturers to provide drivers, but why should they chase a moving target?
The only excuse I've heard for not providing a fixed API is to prevent the manufacturers from only releasing binaries. Open source is preferable, but close source is still preferable to non existant.
I even bought the expensive OS eh... XP something...and it won't work on my PPC! It wasn't even the cheapest OS I could find. I spent good money for this. What is up with that? Doesn't the PPC have better support. Yea, I could have chosen that other bargain basement OS, but sheesh I want to spend good money on things. This OS and my PPC just won't run no matter how hard I try! I even Googled for a solution. NOTHING!
:) (love my AMD powered Averatec).
*Fun over*
You should be able to return it and correct your purchasing decision. So nothing but some time was lost and that you gained back in education.
Hardware/Software incompatability is not anything specific to Linux. Get used to it and be thankful for generous return policies.
I boot my notebook from a knoppix live CD all the time and connect with the built in wireless adaptor. It's one of the expensive ones you can only get from Walmart
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
My dual boot laptop (XP - Linux) looses (sp?) all it's video settings if I boot it into Linux (makdrake 10) with the WIFI PCMCIA card in????? Eh? I then have to re-install the video drivers (nvidea) just to get X working. What a joke.
;)
I now run linux as a virtual machine whilst running in XP and - bless - Linux works fine.
I'm not trolling - I think Linux is great (I program Unix boxes for a living) - I just don't get the whole "Linux is all I use" mentality. Why make life hard?
As they say in the darts championships... "Flame ON!"
On a contract, the motel only has wireless. I'd bought my base system....
/lib/2.blah, and, lo and behold, there was the driver, under extras/.
Anywhoo, I tried buying a wireless router, hoping I could plug my NIC into it, and set it as a router/access point. The end of that was when I called LinkSys, and they said "you can't do it that way."
So I got a PCI card. D-Link. My old RH9 didn't recognize it, so I booted up the live DVD of SuSE 10. It didn't know it, either. I called D-Link, and after several go-'rounds, "tech support" told me to call "pre-purchase support" during business hours, since "tech support" didn't know what chipset they used.
Right.
Called a friend, who told me it was probably an Atheros, and the driver I was looking for was ath_pci. He also said that someone else online had been moaning about the madwifi drivers not working well....
Except, online, you *really* need to figure out just how old such a moan is. I moused around down in
modprobe ath_pci, and SuSE recognized the card, let me configure it, and voila, online, with no trouble.
Um, except for a brand new, clone, optical mouse that SuSE Could. Not. Figure. Out. (as in, it turned off the led so hard, I had to power cycle the box).
So, with no mouse, I tried to do Webmail, with the version of Firefox on SuSE 10. It's not "merely* aggressive about blocking popups, it REFUSES TO ADMIT THAT I TOLD IT TO A) STOP BLOCKING THEM FROM THE WEBMAIL SITE, AND B) STOP BLOCKING THEM *ALL*.
And when it blocks the popup compose window, IT DOESN'T LET YOU TAB TO THE "CLICK HERE" TO OPEN THE WINDOW.
mark, not happy with Firefox 1.0.6, but happy to *finally* be back online....
It's nice for hardware manufacturers to provide drivers, but why should they chase a moving target?
And Windows ISN'T???
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Every OS has them available freely, it would be a good idea to doublecheck before making hardware purchases for ANY os (Windows excluded).
i've had few problems using madwifi or atheros drivers and wpa_supplicant with my dlink pcmcia card, but i've been staying away from usb wifi adapters for exactly the reasons you stated
For great wireless support try OpenBSD. They support an amazing number of wireless cards, the man pages list which exact models are supported, and they are treated just like any other network interface so you don't need to use weird utilities to set them up. I'll never go back.
For desktop use you could consider an external wireless ethernet bridge (such as a Linksys WET54G) - the connection to the desktop is via standard 100BaseT ethernet.
;)
No problems with drivers here
but it was rejected as all my submissions are,
5 195525114
http://www.linuxelectrons.com/article.php/2005120
Take a look at the reverse engineering project here,
http://linux-bcom4301.sourceforge.net/
The only wifi chip that I know doesn't have a Free driver is the broadcom. And now even that's not true with this which has recently become just about usable.
Off the top of my head the following chipsets have Free linux drivers available: Texas Instruments ACX100/ACX111, RaLink 2400/2500/2570, Intel ipw2100/ipw2200, Realtek rtl8180, Atmel at76c5xxx, and the ADMtek adm8211. There are one or two more, but I can't remember them right now.
There are also non-Free (despite the fact that the site says they're GPL) but otherwise decent drivers for the Atheros chipsets provided by the madwifi project.
I don't know where you got your information from, but you're very wrong. And the future of Linux wifi support is looking far stronger than any other OS with the new generic software 802.11 stack that's just gone into the kernel.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
I have a Belkin 802.11g usb card based on the rt2500 chipset. It works great with the ndiswrapper kernel module. Make sure to follow the directions in the README/INSTALL files. Different versions of ndiswrapper work to varying degrees. I use ndiswrapper-1.1rc1 for the rt2500 Belkin adapter and ndiswrapper-0.10 for the builtin Broadcom adapter on my laptop. It sucks having to use different versions for the different cards, but I just set up a script to change things for me and it pretty much just works. Linux' support for hardware can be hard to set up initially, but once you get it working it usually continues to work (unlike a certain proprietary OS that fails every time the Wind-blows).
I had a very similar problem with a Netgear Atheros-based card. I downloaded the DriverLoader demo version. However, when I specified the driver for it to use, instead of giving me the time limited demo, and instead of giving me a "registered" tag, it gave me an "OEM" tag. The conclusion I draw is that Netgear has done some dort of deal with the DriverLoader folks that means you get a free licence. Which is fair enough given that you already shelled out for the card and drivers already. You may wish to see if Belkin has done a similar deal. In any event, it would be nice if more vendors did this.
So far, I think SuSe is on the right track, being they have had the best WLAN support I've seen (groan). I remember listening to a roomate bitch for hours as he tried to get his Centrino with bg2100 wifi going on his fresh install of Fedora. I chuckled happily as I effortlessly surfed on my Centrino bg2200 on SuSe 10.0.
I explained to him that he was trying to make an elephant move like a cat, and that Fedora is hands down a brilliant server OS, and that he needed to grab Ubuntu or SuSe if he wanted to dance. As some distros move to the desktop environment (praise God, I can get rid of Windows on my networks all together!), we shall see more support for WLAN projects.
I did some research on the net before I bought my USB PrismII device. It took a couple hours and I didn't get stuck with a Windows-only device. :) How freaking sweet is that! No compiling anything, just boom, it works.
On the downside, I use a Mac, and tho my device (D-Link DWL122) came with a Mac driver, it was almost unusable. Unfortunately Airports were dropped from the Apple site TWO DAYS before I decided I needed wifi, and were going for $200 on eBay. Since my Clamshell iBook goes for $350 on eBay, that was right out.
The D-Link was $30, but only wanted to do http traffic. SSH caused a kernel crash in less than a minute. Nice. Fortunately D-Link concealed on a foreign version of their site (Taiwan or somewhere) a newer release driver for OS X. That made it usable, though I have some scripts that help keep it from freezing the machine (can't sleep the laptop without ifconfig down first).
I ended up running Yellow Dog Linux based of Fedora Core 1. After having to compile my own linux-wlan-ng driver and supporting configuration binaries, I had wifi that wouldn't crash my machine, and performed better than the OSX driver. It still went down sometimes. Later I used Ubuntu, which came with everything I needed, but I still had to configure my scripts to set up the card. Still went down sometimes. I am currently running Mandrake LE 2005 PPC, which came with the driver but no configuration binaries. I compiled just the binaries, and got it working. Still goes down. My solution is a script that ifconfig down's (otherwise you may have critical hot unplug issues), unloads the module, tells the user to unplug the device and replug it, reloads the module, and runs dhclient again. I usually only have to do this once per boot, so if it runs for days I'm fine.
If I was smarter I could make my script do whatever unplugging and replugging the device does to avoid interaction, but I don't care that much.
One other issue that I had on all of these distros: dhclient doesn't know how to talk to devices that don't have names like ethx. I understand that you can set up an alias to take care of this, but I gave up on that. If you get the latest dhcp from ISC, it will compile easily on anything. Then you can just dhclient wlan0 and you are up and running.
OpenBSD macppc now supports a lot of devices. Frankly I've been testing it and it NEVER GOES DOWN. Not only that, but the tiny bsd.rd installer supports installing the os OVER USB WIFI devices
I have one of those Belkin USB adaptors as well. Using Kanotix it is automatically detected, support is built into the kernel... Kanotix is the way forwards!
I use the rt2x00 package (1.1 stable) and it supports WPA (PSK) just fine thanks - not sure about using any of the other WPA methods though.
I've actually got a 802.11g belkin card, luckily it had a rt2500 chip. I actually found the rt2x00 module easier to use and far more stable than ndiswrapper.
I don't think the state of WLAN in linux is all that dire - its a bit like to bad old days when you always had to do your research before purchasing that video / network card / motherboard etc. Think of it as a great way to combat impulse purchases!
I recently bought a wireless card because it was cheap after rebate at CompUSA. I was glad to see that the card had open linux drivers from the chipset maker and that there was a community project to improve them. Mine is based on the rt2500 chipset but there are others supported by the driver. You can find more info at their site.
Rt2x00
I haven't had any problems using my card with Scientific Linux 4.
You have a good point, but you are discounting the enormous complexity required to build a desktop OS/system. This requires a longer range view which translates into some patience unless you've got the "right" hardware.
Look at it from a different angle, *nixes are replacing important back-end systems these days. This is a different kind of complexity than a desktop, but it's happening and the future looks bright. Next is the desktop.
That's going to take a long time. By then many of you will probably have moved onto the next OS anyway because it will be more interesting.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I recently recommended that a friend buy a thinkpad to support his budding municipal planning/consulting business.
To show him how well Linux compared to Windows on the desktop since he'd last seen it, I brought along my Knoppix 4.02 disc with some tweaks on my thumb drive.
He hadn't been able to connect to anything wirelessly in the neighborhood with the default windows install, and when I rebooted, the knoppix disc got him online immediately post-boot.
While this won't solve your problem, it WILL give you a solid example of Wireless Linux that you can then install and configure when you reboot to your normal distro.
STOP. You're being farmed.
I use the linux-wlan-ng drivers since this thing's a Prism2 chipset. I have to hand-hack a line of code to make them compile, then play with rc.d files to make it start at boot time (Gentoo), and when I changed to Gentoo I had to take tarballs from my Windoze partition in order to emerge the drivers, but by God it now works just fine!
If you buy the Netgeat wg511 V.2 it will work. HOWEVER only if its the one from china. The one from taiwan wont work because its a totally different card. So why the fuck do they call it v.2 if its a totally different card on the inside.
Absolutely. I check long and hard before I buy some hardware that it is supported under Linux. If it's not, I don't buy it. Same with software. There is software, and some games that I would love to play, but I'm not reneging on my principles, giving in, and installing Windows. The software companies and games companies can come to me if they want my money. Same with hardware companies.
Get your own free personal location tracker
The network developers have recognised that this is a major problem at present. One of the big problems was that nobody was in charge in effect of wireless! (although Jeff Garzik has done a wonderful job of overall networking devices). John Linville has now taken on the job of sorting this mess out. (http://lwn.net/Articles/167272/ http://lwn.net/Articles/167270/).
Subsequent to this discussion there has been a lot of positive discussion on the netdev mailing list and here are some updates:
* Public git tree has opened now
* WPA patches are getting merged
* Other drivers are getting merged into kernel
* OSDL is having a summit to get together the key players (http://developer.osdl.org/shemminger/blog/?p=29)
I would say the picture in six months to a year will be dramatically better.
If you want to contribute then google the netdev mailing list and jump on in. We would certainly appreciate help!!!
how many times do people have to be told how the driver issue works on linux (and other free/open operating systems)...
this is not a WLAN issue, neither a linux issue!
just an issue of closed consumer hardware (in your case WLAN) and 1 or 2 mainstream consumer operating systems (that are also closed).
personally i think this is a pretty lame slashdot cover story. it should, again IMO, have been in the 'Ask' section, or not posted at all.
so what do you do if you want hardware that works on linux:
(my 15 y.o. sister already knows the answer)
1. first read on the internet if it has linux drivers/ succes stories
2. if so: then buy
this is how it works, has worked, and will continue to work for at least upcoming few years. you either get used to this prcedure, or buy hardware that might not work.
note: some people buy unsopported hardware and reverse engeneer a driver for it. these people make a differnece to the freesoftware movement.
The problem with alternate OSes is that drivers for more complex devices (such as certain USB devices and wireless cards) are hard to make. Manufacturers won't give up any specifications, nor provide drivers for alternate OSes (manufacturers will complain "Why should we spend $$$ developing drivers that only 2% of the market will use?"). Not every Linux user is an electrical engineer or computer engineer who knows enough about hardware to create a device driver. And even the most talented electrical/computer engineer can't reverse engineer everything.
When you run an operating system that only 2-3% of the world uses, getting driver support for all of your hardware can be difficult, especially if you have devices such as digital cameras and wireless devices. This isn't the fault of Linux itself; if manufacturers at least provided specifications, then the developers that know C and C++ and electrical/computer engineering can create device drivers.
But, yeah, *nix does a lot of complex things very well because it is *nix, after all. However, things that are easy or should be easy for users (installing software, drivers, user interfaces, etc.) are very difficult to implement for programmers, because of all of the abstractions they have to create, the UI theory that they have to learn, and sometimes even political issues (manufacturers and drivers, for instance. And there is a small segment of *nix users who only want FOSS drivers, which can make things even more political). What is much easier to design, a typical Unix command line application (they aren't cryptic, either, unless you're talking about regular expressions, which I don't use too often), or a GUI application. The Unix command is much easier to implement, you just use console I/O (very easy to do with C and C++). Want to implement a GUI? Well, first you have to design the core program, then you have to write GUI wrapper classes using some GUI toolkit that doesn't fit with the language, then you have to design the UI of the program (which should have been done first).... Not all programmers are Steve Jobs, you know.
Use Linux only for a few years, then check back and decide which you think is "hard".
It's all in your perspective, I guess, but I rarely boot into Windows for more than a few minutes these days. And then it's only to test software/hardware before releasing it to my users. It's too hard to get anything done.
Not user friendly enough, I guess.
I spend much less time tinkering with * on Linux than ANY Windows user does dealing with Antivirus/Adware/Spyware/Maintenance/etc.
But I've been using Linux for a long time, and am very comfortable with it. From my perspective, it's much easier to deal with. I'm not saying it's BETTER, I'm sure that's always going to be decided on an individual basis, but I like not having to think about how I'm going to afford the next version of OS or Office Suite, etc. I just apt-get it and forget it...
--dingletec--
You have a good point, but you are discounting the enormous complexity required to build a desktop OS/system.
No, I'm not discounting it. I understand the complexity involved, which is precisely why telling someone "why don't you write your own driver?" is so assinine. Yet I see that answer tossed out far too regularly here as the answer to all hardware and software woes, as if it is somehow effortless to create such solutions. It is this mentality I'd like to see changed more than anything else, because that kind of mentality is really saying "hey, things work great for me, so I don't think we need to change anything at all" when clearly change is called for.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Since we're already on the subject, could anyone provide recommendations on proven wireless cards for linux? What provides the best overall compatability with features?
I thought I was the only one that LOVED spending hours looking "long and hard" when I want a piece of hardware. It's my hobby. I have nothing better to do than spend all my free time for 3 days trying to find out what wireless network card I should buy. I would never want whatever best buy has to JUST FUCKING WORK WITH LINUX FOR ONCE!
<high-level position here>
<name of stupid small company here>
No comment necessary really. You reap what you sow... you cave,
vendors dont give a shit about you. Stand up for OPEN documentation,
and you can make a change. Fold and you tell them that you really do
appreciate their product and practices just the way they are.
Your choice.
There's only one problem with this, I (and many potential Linux converts) already own the equipment and have for a couple of years!! The longer Linux takes to get up to speed on the wireless front the slower the rate of new converts will be on the home desktop. You wont find us using Linux on the desktop just yet unless we're hardwired into the network. Lucky for us Cat5 is still in plentiful supply (generally already in the cupboard wasting away) and most wireless routers come with a few patch ports.
Linksys routers make GREAT hotel NICs. They have pretty good radios, out of the box will beat almost any pc card/usb dongle and if you pop them open and mess with the wiring a bit its even better. It won't beat some hardcore external directional crap you see people sit on their rice burner hondas, but you could always wire the same into the linksys's durable connectors instead of some 100-insertion max tin foil PC card.
The default firmware doesn't support acting like a NIC, but the hardware sure does. With some more work (ie google + brains + void warranty for new firmware) you can run a kismet server/drone and pump lots of fun logs to your PC. They are 12V too, so driving around with a laptop is doable, and you wont show up in everyone's logs aka netstumbler.
Stuff you might take for granted on the patched linksys can be a bitch on regular NICs (mac spoofing, rfmon) and if it hangs, you just reset it versus the whole PC. (assuming your wired ethernet driver is stable, hopefully)
I perfer www.dd-wrt.com, but you can also try one of several other free firmwares out there. (openWRT is most visible one now I'd say)
Just DONT pay $20 for the crap firmware written on some south american bum-f**k island that stole all his code from GPL sources and refuses to post his. (perpetual "development" beta releases, a release candidate source expected when half the universe is gone from proton decay)
I recently bought a Zyxel ZyAIR G-220, for the sole reason that Zyxel open sourced their drivers. They are not to pretty, and it took me about 4 hours to get it to work (mostly due to unrelated compile errors), but it works fine.
If you want drivers to improve, then show companys that do make linux drivers for their wireless cards that you support them, and buy their hardware. Zyxel opened up their drirers, and a soureforge projet was setup to improve them. http://zd1211.ath.cx/
Fighting ignorance with ignorance.
I commented on a crud bit of Linux behaviour (wifi card killed video star) - It was kinda on-topic...
You comment on how you use Linux seamlessly (and you are an *expert*). You mention about using Linux for a few years and then check back! You sad mofo! I've been programming Unix boxes for a living for the last five years so don't get all "houlier-than-thou" on me matey.
Think I'm tellin' lies? Look up IVR & Periphonics - they're the things I program and they're very much Unix. So don't give me no "use it for a couple of years" crap.
Du-uh!
I recently had my first bash at Linux and installed Ubuntu. Had a bunch of problems with various things (X not starting, etc) but wireless setup wasn't one of them - ndiswrapper and my Windows Netgear drivers got me working with only a minor hiccup.
There are quite a lot of USB 802.11b/g dongles out there containing the zydas zd1211 chipset, which has a reasonably active GPL development effort based at http://zd1211.ath.cx/, including ongoing work from the manufacturers, and aiming eventually for inclusion in the main kernel tree. My company has had a lot of success using devices with this chipset under linux.
Check out the madwifi and madwifi-ng drivers, which support the atheros chipset. You can find out a lot about the project and the supported cards by googling. I have an 802.11a/b/g card with an atheros chipset in my server. It acts as a WAP, and it works much better than the cheap consumer wireless routers.
The prism chipsets are also good, but I have had nothing but trouble using ndiswrapper. YMMV.
-Eric
It was so difficult for me to find any actual drivers for wireless ethernet cards under Linux that I eventually gave up and just purchased an external wireless-ethernet bridge. Most computers these days have built-in ethernet, and a wireless-ethernet bridge has the added benefit of allowing additional non-wireless machines to quickly get on a network. Plus, you can get just about any operating system on wireless this way, without having to worry about driver headache.
I hope that one day I'll be able to find a wireless ethernet card that just works. Even if you do find a supported card, it's usually for a particular chipset, or a particular revision, and it's very hard to guarantee that you'll get that chipset or revision when ordering online. I just want to be able to download a stock kernel from kernel.org, check Y or M for my wireless device, and reboot and be done with it. It doesn't look like we're quite at that stage yet.
Titus Barik
I think the story submitter wanted practical information, not to partake in the blame game. Here it is: WLAN support is abysmal on Linux compared to that on Windows or OS X. You'll be hunting for driver support (if it exists) or spending a couple hours fiddling with ndiswrapper. Pile on the routine annoyances of Linux (the handful of commands necessary to connect to any AP) and you'll get frustrated quickly. No sugar coating; WLAN on Linux sucks.
Yes, we all know that blaming the establishment is very convenient for avoiding the truth. But please, the submitter didn't want to argue; he just wanted some facts.
I was able to get a a Trendnet TEW-423PI working fine with a Slackware, and custom kernels I built. I was able to get both the native drives and ndiswrapper working. Then my roomate ran a cable down to my room, and and made the Wireless connection unneeded. My only problem was lack of support for dual-cpu systems.
ttyl
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
If you want wireless now and can't get your AE card to work, there are few options. The Linksys WUSB11 USB 802.11b card works "out of the box" under Ubuntu PPC. You can get that for $10 or so at CompUSA. That is the only USB wireless adapter that I have gotten to work natively in Linux on PPC so far.
BTW, ndiswrapper is x86-only at the moment, so that is why it is such a pain in the neck.
... ndiswrapper and madwifi.
The two projects have different aims. If I understand it correctly Madwifi aims to have native linux drivers. ndiswrapper works by acting as a wrapper around the windows drivers. So ndiswrapper is less "pure" to the zealots, on the other hand it seemed to support more hardware. It is worth noting that the ndiswrapper might not support all hardware and to check your compatability list. Also the wireless manufacturers will sometimes shop two different chipsets in the exactly the same shell, with no differentiation between the different versions.
Check out the following HOWTO. This is specific to debian.
meh
If the Windows drivers work fine, who cares?
I mean, yeah it'd be nice if they supported Linux, but in the grand scheme, if the card works, then what does it matter?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
...something friendly and easy to browse when shopping for hardware. Why distro vendors are not collaborating on maintaining an HCL site is a mystery to me, as it would be a powerful tool in persuading HW vendors to offer support.
/rewarding/ manufacturers that don't support Linux.
There is one at Linuxdevices.org, but its just a glorified messaging board and mostly out of date anyway.
I also find it unsettling that Linux users keep buying peripherals without checking compatability first, and end up
The real weak spots in Linux drivers are for dialup modems and Wifi cards. And Bluetooth adapters. Oh and Intel video is still broken.
Soundcard support is pretty decent, until you realize the OS often implicitly locks-out multiple apps from outputting audio... so uses involving alerts and alarms (timers, calendars, IMs, softphones, etc.) cannot be relied upon. Obviously this is also an obsctruction for musicians and DJs. But ya gotta maintain compatability with 1991 apps so the brokenness stays.
No one below the GTK+/Qt layer is paying attention to desktop use-cases, and those GUI developers are left helpless on many issues because of it. Otherwise I would not have to write the above paragraph about audio. Also, there would be stable ABIs for drivers and applications (which only removes the freedom to change the architechture BETWEEN major OS releases).
As for NDISwrapper... Thank you Microsoft, for providing a stable ABI that allows me to use my USB Wifi card on Linux!
I purchased a Belkin Wireless G USB Adapter, the drivers for this device were at this location:
http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm
I noticed there were specific linux drivers there. (I only used the OSX drivers which worked perfectly)
I used a Netgear ME101 Ethernet bridge, purchased from justdeals.com for $25. Plug one end of an ethernet cable into your computer, the other end into the bridge, and you're ready to go. I even cobbled together a cable that powers it off the +5v from my USB port, so I can use it on a laptop. It's big and unwieldly, but gets the job done if you have to use Linux.
I misunderstood how this page worked. It is still useless because it's filled with a bunch of cards no longer sold.
An actually usefull page would be one with links to actual places you can purchase the card. Someone could make some money linking to amazon or something. The truth is no one knows which card to buy it's a roulette thing.
It has been statistically shown that helmets increase the risk of head injury.
1 - Many manufacturers switch chip sets without switching card model names. You can check the compatibility list, buy a supported card and find out when you plug it in that it is not supported.
2 - If you buy a laptop with built in WiFi, you're stuck with the chip that the manufacturer selected. You can hope to get it working with something like ndiswrapper, but that doesn't always work.
I've had mixed results. First cards I bought were Orinoco 802.11b silver cards and they worked pretty much on the first try after I found the wlan drivers. Likewise with the Intel wireless built into my Thinkpad T30. Up until the latest Windows driver download (2 days ago) the wireless on my Thinkpad worked better under Linux than Windows XP.
Then I bought a card that was supposed to have a Prism chip but turned out to have a Realtek chip. They provided support for 2.4.20 and 2.6.? for Redhat. I got the 2.4.20 version working with Debian and became bound to that kernel rev. As linux kernel versions came and went, the vendor never updated their driver. I also found an Atheros based chip that worked just great with the Madwifi drivers.
My most recent laptop is an AMD Turion from HP. I was not able to get the built in Broadcom WiFi until ver 1.5 of ndiswrapper was released.
I have same Belkin USB Wireless Adaptor(model no. F5D7050B)
Belkin USB Wireless Adaptor has different versions with different chipsets depends on when it's manufactured. Mine was with RT73 chipset.
And, yep, it works with ndiswrapper 1.8. It doesn't work with ndiswrapper 1.7. So be careful.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I spend much less time tinkering with * on Linux than ANY Windows user does dealing with Antivirus/Adware/Spyware/Maintenance/etc.
Fallacy... I spend absolutely no time dealing with antivirus/adware/spyware. I don't even have software installed for any of these three, and I've never had a significant problem with any of them. In all my years of windows use, I've had a single worm infection. It was harmless and even kinda funny: Code Red. Recently, I had to install a third-party patch to protect myself for a couple of days, but that was a first... And other maintenance? I spend a minimal amount of time maintaining...maybe a defrag every once in a while and automatic updates through Windows update...the type of stuff people have to do for any OS.
Oh... I've also got an Ubuntu laptop, and I love it. I can see myself making a near complete transition from windows to linux in the next couple of years. Though, coincidentally, adding a wifi card to my laptop, recently, ended up being a somewhat painful process.
So, you see... I'm not really too much of a windows fan. I just can't stand seeing zealots like yourself bashing other linux users for pointing out obvious shortcomings and then using the opportunity to bag on Windows in a way that's completely off-base. Grow up.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The LinuxQuestions.org Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) is an excellent guide to Linux-compatible hardware devices, generally listing the (in)compatible Kernel/Distro version as well. It seems that Belkin cards generally do well in Linux. I recently bought and installed a Belkin Wireless Desktop Card, model F5D7000; Although it absolutely refused to work with WPA, getting 128-bit WEP to work with it was quite easy.
For the love of Dog, don't just go out and buy any old crappy wireless card and hope that linuxant or ndiswrapper will support it. All of these slashbots who recommend this route are just remorseful that they didn't do their research before wasting their money on a monopoly-sustaining wireless card.
The worst part is that ndiswrapper and linuxant usually don't allow full use of the card. Sure, you can probably get some connectivity out of it, but sometimes you can't use 802.11g, put the card into promiscuous mode, or use one of the fancy wifi signal-strength and network information applets in KDE and GNOME.
When people ask me about Linux wireless support, I tell them two things:
1) Skip on down to Staples and pick up a Netgear WG511T. It'll cost $40-$50 depending on where in the nation you buy it and what rebates they have going at the time.
2) Boot your favorite distro and install the MadWifi drivers. Configure ath0 for DHCP, sit within range of an access point, and you're good to go.
The madwifi drivers work with Atheros chipsets and evidently Atheros themselves contributed a large amount of the code, so it would be in the interest of all Linux users to support them by checking out the MadWifi compatibility listing and purchasing one of the listed cards. You'll be helping the open source community and getting the most out of your wireless card at the same time.
Seriously - whenever you buy something for your PC you should read the side of the box and ensure that the manufacturer has included the hardware and software environment that you use.
If not, then you have several options:
1) Research your environment and work out what is supported (hint - the Realtek based wireless technology is very good).
2) Ask the supplier.
3) Ask an IT professional
4) Give up and find something more within your abilities.
The approach of just buying something and assuming it will work does not hold any water - with either Linux or Windows.
The problem I have with the state of WLAN is that there are so many competing projects. It's a real minefield for the noob who just wants their card to work.
The majority of cards are now softmac rather than fullmac, so you need an 802.11 stack in addition to the chipset specific driver. Rather than have one stack we seem to have a half dozen: the sipsolutions stack, the dscape stack, the madwifi stack, etc. All of them have bugs and all of them are configured slightly differently.
Features like WPA require an interface between wpa_supplicant and the driver, and once again there are a half dozen variants. There's the wext interface, the ng interface, the madwifi interface, the dscape interface, etc. The ng deserves special mention because you can't even use iwconfig to set some parameters, it's that different.
Most cards have a binary firmware that needs to be uploaded once after every cold boot and getting those firmwares is itself an exercise in complexity. There are a half dozen tools to extract firmwares, copyright prevents the firwmares from being included with the Linux drivers, etc.
On top of all this, every distro has their own way of configuring the special options required for wifi. None of the distros seem to support WPA in their GUI configurators, so you need to drop to the command line to configure WPA supplicant, and then you find the distros all do it differently. The NetworkManager utility which promises to make this all easy doesn't even support WPA (though it will Real Soon Now).
The state of WLAN on Linux probably won't improve until all the drivers support WEXT, there's a standardised "fwcutter" like tool that knows how to extract every firmware for every supported wifi card, there's decent WPA support in at least one distro, and there's a single goddamn softmac stack.
As I understand it, the reason a lot of manufacturers won't open up the specs for their chips is because they're cheap software controlled radio tranceivers; where the only restriction on the radio frequency used, is the software itself. This is what I've heard anyway. Whether it's true, or not, I couldn't say; if it is then it's moderatly understandable as to why they're unwilling to open up their specs.
Yeah, I had a sig once; I got bored of it.
WMP54G v4 works with and without WPA-PSK encryption on Suse 9.3 Pro with a native rt2500 driver (so neither Windows drivers nor NDISWRAPPER are required) but not with the rt2500 driver provided in the distribution. You need to download and install the latest stable rt2500 driver and configuration utility from the rt2x00 Open Source Project at rt2x00.serialmonkey.com (release 1.1.0-b3 worked for me); follow the instructions in the README file. Use an ASCII passphrase w/o spaces and don't forget to reboot after setting up everything.
Believe it or not, some of the things chain stores like Best Buy sell are crap. There is nothing compared to reviews written by people actually using the item to gauge if it will fit your needs. Magazines base their "scores" for hardware and software on a simple formula: 9+fraction of advertising the company gives them.
On this topic, a certain wireless nic may technically work under Windows, but when you see multiple posts on the company's own forums of people having trouble keeping their connection alive for more than a minute, you know it's time to move along.
Research pays off in the long run, irrespective of the OS.
Nice grammer dude!
Mod down because if this guy's english is any indication of his intelligence then he surely doesn't know what he is talking about. Someone who is knowledgable enough with abi's and api's knows proper english or his or her own native langauge better.
You have absolutely no idea what you're talking about! How on earth did this get modded up!?
There is only the Linux kernel... and no you don't have to develop a driver for multiple versions of Linux! That's nothing short of absolute lies!
If it's one thing I hate it's an anti-Linux zealot that doesn't even know what they're talking about. At least take the time to learn about what you preach against.
A point by point rebuttal of everything you said:
But first let me point out that I've actually written device drivers for both Windows and Linux, I am an open source software author, and I've played parts in writing large applications for big Windows shops. I run and use Linux and Windows on a daily basis... something you have obviously never done.
So here goes...
Windows moves *slower*. When you're writing drivers, slower is demonstrably a good thing.
Windows does not move slower than Linux. The driver API changed significantly with NT, then with 2000. It's been largely stable since then, but there are still continuous changes. It's a complete misnomer to suggest otherwise.
By the same token, the Linux API isn't as unstable as "keeping the API open" suggests. There are many drivers available in the kernel that have been there for... a LONG time. Most of them were ported to 2.6 with no trouble at all.
As a person who has written device drivers I can tell you that writing and maintaining a Linux driver is significantly easier. The docs and community support is all there, and everything makes sense. It's pretty much the opposite when it comes to Windows driver development.
Trying to maintain a driver for Linux would require constant attention.
Simply not true. And the beautiful part about Linux is that even if a driver does need updating, there's a significant chance that if the driver is used by enough people, some person will just fix it on their own. But let me just reiterate that this is completely untrue in most cases. At least not any more than it's true for Windows.
Plus, Linus' kernel isn't stable. He just waves his hand in the air and announces that 'the distros' will have to make Linux actually work. That means that now we have Red Hat's kernel, Suse's kernel, Mandrake's kernel, Debian's kernel...
I'm sighing right now. Why... where do these idiots come from? And how do they get modded up!? Linux is a kernel. It's not an operating system. Nor is Red Hat, Ubuntu, Gentoo, etc... they're distributions of an OS that uses Linux as its kernel.
I've built Linux From Scratch a few times, so I'm painfully / joyfully aware of what this actually means. You're obviously confused about this point so I'll explain it to you.
Basically no matter what distro of Linux you use... you are using your own customized version of a Linux based OS. It may not seem like it when you've first installed it, but it's still true. By the time you get to know what you're doing your OS is probably inherently different than even some other person using the same base distro. You've installed different packages, maybe compiled your own apps and installed them wherever you feel like it. Customized start up scripts, etc.
Whether or not you see that as a benefit is up to you. But let me tell it is a great benefit, and that's what makes Linux so great! That's why there are so many flavors (and no there's not just 5, there are literally hundreds). Choice is what makes it so great.
Imagine a world with 5 automobiles that were supposed to fit everyone.
Anyway... getting back to the point. So you've got all these infinite numbers and possibilities of Linux based OSes out there. Driver hell? I don't think so. This doesn't mean the kernel is any different and it doesn't mean writing a device driver for Linux has to be re-done for every OS, distro, or any other such nonsense.
it means any commercial entity has to develop separate driver
Maintaining a database of all the hardware which works for linux is hard, it'd be asier to keep track of what hardware doesn't work. These days we have MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE: in every module: This exports the list of the IDs that every modules support. Recolect the IDs of all modules and you'd get a sort of automated database of all the devices supported by linux
/dev/dsp directly....
Soundcard support is pretty decent, until you realize the OS often implicitly locks-out multiple apps from outputting audio.
Applications using alsa doesn't suffer such problems. Stop using apps that use
"[BIG YELLOW CAUTION ICON] CAUTION: FCC rules strictly prohibit users from installing 5-GHz (802.11a,802.11a/b, 802.11a/b/g) Wireless LAN Mini PCI cards. Under no circumstances should the user install such a device. Only trained Dell service personnel are authorized to install a 5-GHz Wireless LAN Mini PCI card."
I wouldn't put it past Dell to say that when it's not strictly true, but there appear to be some fairly stiff regulations in the 5 Ghz area. There's a fairly detailed writeup on just how complex the rules in the 5-GHz bands (there are several 5-GHz bands and two distinct sets of regulations, apparently) get. Caveat: apparently there were changes to the rules in October 2004 that loosened several restrictions considerably, but I don't know if an installer requirement still exists (or ever did).
-- Old Man Kensey
Self-righteousness aside, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82 E16833130111 + http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Main _Page is a winning combination. It's been rock-solid for me on my mythbox under very heavy loads.
Plus the chipset maker (Railink) are good folks and release their specs + drivers to the F/OSS community.
Does anyone have any actual evidence (i.e. other than just "the manufacturer said so so it must be true") that an open source driver for a WiFi card would be illegal or a violation of FCC regs?
Someone who cares about freedom, wow.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I picked up an Ethernet-to-WiFi adapter for my X-Box and it works great. It also works on any laptop that has Ethernet (so far at least). Would these be a reasonable purchase for Linux boxes?
I'm building a Linux based laptop now (my first try at it) and I'm concerned about the wireless difficulties. I have a few more of these adapters lying around, though.
IIRC, Linus added one or two clauses to the GPL allowing for binary modules.
i.e. it's 99% GPL, but some modifications were made to the initial release. This IS legal - The initial author of some software can release it under any license they want. Either that, or it was deemed that due to the way the kernel module loading system worked, non-GPL modules were allowed to exist.
The end result, whatever the means, is that non-GPL (including binary-only) kernel modules are perfectly legal (albeit frowned upon - the kernel bitches with "taint" warnings when you load a non-GPL module.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
The belkin adapter works fine with the Ralink drivers, although the driver is sort of buggy and doesn't recognize it if it's plugged into a 2.0 port. It works fine in 1.1 ports.
Given that, WLAN support in Linux is still pretty abysmal. Gotta thank the vendors for that one.
Why?
TI is an OEM licensor for Linuxant's driver loader. That means you can use driverloader with the native XP drivers, and that linuxant, in particular, works on making sure the TI XP drivers work great with driverloader.
Just install it in "DEMO" mode. Once it detects an ACX100, ACX110, or ACX111, it'll automagically go into full-featured mode.
TI's done linux right, at least if your worldview permits proprietary drivers.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
When it comes to WLAN support, as long as you avoid Broadcom chipsets (semi-common, but it takes ten minutes of Googling to find if your card is a Broadcom paperweight) and Airgo chipsets (rare as hell - only 3-4 Airgo-based cards exist, the Belkin pre-N hardware being one of those three) are about the only ones that don't have a native Linux driver now.
Atheros - supported by madwifi
Intersil - Supported by the various Prism variants (either linux-wlan, the kernel prism/hermes drivers, or the prism54 drivers)
Cisco - Supported (new Ciscos are Atheros-based anyway I believe)
Orinocos - Old ones are supported with a very stable driver. New ones are Atheros-based.
Atmel - I believe these are USB-only, and are supported.
Intel - Supported
The list of cards that are natively supported (although not necessarily in the main kernel tree) is very long.
Given the recent advent of a native Broadcom driver (although currently experimental), it looks like the original poster bought one of the sum total of *four* cards on the market based on one of Airgo's MIMO chipsets. Those would be:
Linksys SRX (note - Avoid Linksys if you're concerned about stable and reliable Linux support, as most of their newer cards are Broadcom bombs.)
Belkin Pre-N
NetGear RangeMax 240 (the previous gen RangeMax equipment is Atheros-based though, my WPN511 works beautifully under Linux.)
There's one other but I don't recall the manufacturer at the moment.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
although Jeff Garzik has done a wonderful job of overall networking devices
Maybe it's just that I've paid more attention to Linux network people than other areas, but they are *machines*. I see Jeff Garzik's posts and work all the time, and Donald Becker produced one hell of a lot of code.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
There's one other chipset without any Linux support - the Airgo MIMO chipset(s)
The good news is that there's a grand total of only 3-4 adapters based on Airgo's chipset. Unfortunately Belkin produces one of them (their Pre-N gear is Airgo-based). Linksys SRX and Netgear RangeMax 240 (not the old RangeMax, the new RM 240 stuff) are the only other two I can think of at the moment. (I'm pretty sure there is one other Airgo-based unit.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Has anybody seen Wyse's front page lately? There is a penguin there I believe. They are pushing the linux based thin clients hard in every roadmap meeting we've had. In healthcare, wireless thin clients are pretty much required - I wonder what their wireless support is like in linux products?
The WPN511 (RangeMax) card is also Atheros-based.
Watch out for the WPNT511 (RangeMax 240) - those are Airgo-based. Currently the only 11g chipset manufacturer I know of without any native Linux support in any form. (add Broadcom if you don't want to count the recently released experimental Broadcom native drivers.)
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Nope, wrong. ALL modems work under Linux. All of them. Plug in or install a modem, and it *will* work, straight out of the box, no additional software necessary. And before you say it, no, winmodems aren't modems no matter how you cut it.
Soundcard support is pretty decent, until you realize the OS often implicitly locks-out multiple apps from outputting audio...
It's not the OS locking out multiple streams from playing, your card is incapable of playing more than one stream. Get a better sound card and you won't have this problem. My suggestion is the Creative Soundblaster Live! 128. Get the LiveDrive to go with it, and you'll be hard pressed in finding a media cable that doesn't fit, *and* you can play multiple sounds at once.
Help us build a better map!
As with any other OS, you should always find out what will work before you buy it. This isn't a problem with Windows, but any Linux user should check first. I read a good bit of documentation before buying my D-Link DWL-G630, which works with no problems using mad-wifi drivers.
Please name one pair of competing driver projects where both projects are currently active. (e.g. the ar5k project is long dead and was superseded by madwifi well a year or two ago at least, so the ar5k project does not count)
Drivers for differing chipsets do not count.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
I don't have any of these problems on my Turtle Beach Montego (Aureal au8820 chipset)!!! Not even with /dev/dsp! :-P
Microsoft-free since March 28, 2004
I've got a intel 536EP chipset "hardware modem" which I found out means it's really pretty much a softmodem. That isn't an error in packaging, that's an outright lie. Class 1 fax support only? That's a softmodem. I hate marketing bastards. Not to mention after jacking with the VOCP setup and finally figuring out that I had a Net? 256 compatible modem for voice operations that I had to resample everything at 16000 sample rate to avoid the chipmunk effect. OK got that working, lets record an inbound voicemail..ooo sorry you haven't been on google for 2 hours in the recent past, rejected. The recording codec is out of your reach cast +20 searchdrone to learn about the recompile you can't perform on amd64 architecture without a chroot environment. Or you can listen to the "man inside a waterfall voicemail" option we have provided free of charge.
.net IDE and spit out a $20 piece of software that can almost effortlessly send a .wav file right into the gristmill of "modemland" to playback a prompt. Use some lame .dll to handle tones and detect FAX, then pop that shit through something that converts to a .tiff(LZW) file. In those cases, resistance is futile.
I'm just glad I tried the voicemail before endeavoring to hack up vocp.pl to handoff fax calls from vgetty to hylafax's faxgetty. vocp's fax detection just bails with a return code to signal vgetty to call mgetty which despite proof otherwise(hylafax) professes that class 1 fax is "unpossible" with a unix based kernel. Realtime? fuck that!
IMHO, the companies that don't provide real support in their "hardware" modems should feel the brunt of our cash refund returns. It's almost as if you have to burn an exterior serial port to even use a real hardmodem because of industry lies. Even then you better have a nearly legacy US-Robotics or Lucent setup.
That being said, this same modem in a Wintel XP machine running *random share/freeware of 30+ offered* voicemail/fax solution would work like a wet dream. The separation of church/state on windows APIs at the very high level is, dare I say it, competent. Any retard with a captialism streak can fire up a
So, in short, only buy digium cards, ever. To hell with the cost. They actively support FOSS and that is the way to punch wintel shit in the wallet. Please please please prove to me that I am wrong and provide a detailed method to setup a voicemail/fax server using the aforementioned chipset so I don't have to make my locally owned computer hardware store eat $40.
I plugged one into my wife's machine, loaded Kanotix, spent about 1 minute answering the pop-up questions and went straight on line. It also works fine on my lap-top and my desk machine (all on Kanotix), but I haven't yet tried it on my modded XBox.
Well, I'm glad somebody finally came out and said it. That's been my experience also.
I have a HP Workstation with what I thought was a Linux-compatible WL PCI card in it, of course when I got the card home and out of the box, I read the small print -- this was the "new and improved" version 3, and only versions 1 and 2 were compatible with native Linux drivers.
So I'm stuck using ndiswrapper. Which does work, just not very well or conveniently. Changing from one network to another is a 10-minute process involving multiple "coffee breaks" (click on something, wait several minutes) and a full reboot. That's right, a complete reboot -- on a system which otherwise never, ever gets rebooted. I'm just glad it's not a laptop, at least as a desktop this setup is usable, since the network's SSID never changes.
To say that Linux wireless is a little "rough around the edges" (this seems to be the party line on a lot of forums) is a bit of an understatement, in my opinion. It's terrible, and while I do blame the manufacturers for producing undocumented products, its the users who end up holding the bag and Linux that ends up looking bad.
Here's my thought for a 'solution,' or at least a stopgap: the problem isn't that Linux-compatible WL cards don't exist, it's that they're very hard to find and poorly marked. (Witness my "v3" problem.) What somebody with a lot of money needs to do, either an enterprising individual or an organization, is find a manufacturer that makes a well-supported WL card (one that uses a Prism chipset, probably) and contract to buy a production run of them in OEM packaging. Call them whatever you want, toss them in a white box with a driver CD, and sell them for $20 more than they cost.
The community doesn't need support for every brand and flavor and revision and chipset of WL card out there. What we need is one card that's available for more than six months that's easy to get ahold of and actually works. The Linux hardware review sites do part of this, but they don't really let you actually buy the part -- you're stuck trying to find a source for the correct version/revision card yourself, and SOL if you can't find it (as is the case with many of the older "known good" Prism cards).
As I've said in other posts, look at the other major non-Windows platform and the reputation it has for wireless connectivity -- the Mac. Macs only have ONE TYPE of wireless card. They avoid the manufacturer issue altogether by just OEMing one or two chipsets, selling it at a ridiculous premium, and building the driver support into the OS. And it works beautifully; I've yet to find a Mac user who doesn't think that their Airport card wasn't worth the $90 they spent on it. (Okay except for some hackers who want the ability to grab raw frames...)
We can blame the manufacturers all we want, but it's obvious that as a group they're going to ignore the Linux platform. However, there's a demand for Linux wireless cards that actually work without hassle or confusion, and they do exist, they're just hard to find. Somebody with the right amount of capital and connections needs to match the two up.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
And before you say it, no, winmodems aren't modems no matter how you cut it.
This is so true.
One of the few things that I thought Apple did right, back in the dark Amelio days, was when they brought out their version of what was effectively a Winmodem, they called the "GeoPort Telcom Adaptor;" they didn't actually call it a 'modem.' Frankly I think their nomenclature was about right: it's just a sort of physical adaptor that goes between your phone line and your computer, and the rest is done in software. Very little modifying/demodifying of any significance is going on. It's unfortunate that the Winmodem manufacturers weren't similarly inclined.
I have heard that there are some new Ethernet "cards" (mostly built into motherboards) that have started to take this route; they don't have much intelligence at all, but offload the traditional network-card stuff back to the processor. I've never run across one personally, but it seems like the logical route that a cut-rate PC vendor would go.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The best advice is to just look at /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/wireless/Kconfig, and pick a device with one of the chipsets listed in there.
Intel has done a fabulous job of providing Linux drivers for the 2100/2200/2915 MiniPCI wireless cards. Go buy a 2200 or 2915 for B/G or make sure to buy a laptop with Centrino wireless.
The real weak spots in Linux drivers are for dialup modems...
/dev/dsp directly.
I have been using Linux for 11 years, the whole time using dialup, with many different machines, and I never had a problem with a dialup modem. All of them simply worked out of the box, no configuration required. I used to run dual boot with Windows, and at least two of the modems that I had, that ran perfectly well with Linux, simply completely refused to work with Windows, and for several other modems I had to download drivers and configure them. Linux does have hardware issues, but dialup modems are not among them.
No one below the GTK+/Qt layer is paying attention to desktop use-cases, and those GUI developers are left helpless on many issues because of it. Otherwise I would not have to write the above paragraph about audio.
Ehm, and what about the several sound servers that exist? This is simply bullshit. The only problem is with older applications that use
Also, there would be stable ABIs for drivers and applications (which only removes the freedom to change the architechture BETWEEN major OS releases).
Oh no, not this old tired mantra again. It has been discussed over and over and over, and it's getting really boring.
AccountKiller
OK. Lots of discussion about who's fault it is, etc. etc.
Here's the question I have: what card or cards *do work*, *without ndiswrapper*. (I don't want to use binary-only windows drivers. Please don't engage in a philosophical discussion, because there's lots of that above. Just take it as a boundary condition.)
Several years ago, when I asked this question, the answer was get the Lucent Orinoco Gold cards. There were some others that worked as well, but those you could know would work. Unfortunately, Lucent sold the Orinoco name, so there are now cards out there under that name that aren't the same thing, but if you can find a Lucent Orinoco gold card, that's a working 802.11b card.
What cards work with *free drivers* and minimum hassle? 802.11b? 802.11g? I'm particularly interested in PCMCIA cards. Right now, if I had to get another wireless card, I'd probably go ebaying for an old Lucent Orinoco card... which doesn't help with 802.11g, of course. There are a *lot* of cards out there, and most of them don't work with Linux. But some must; which ones are they?
FAQs on wireless with Linux should very clearly say, "Just buy one of these!" Distributions ought to maintain that list for their distribution, ideally.
This is what we used to do in the good old days with video cards (and still do, if we want 3D, which is yet another sob story that goes along with wireless), ethernet cards, sound cards, and so forth.
-Rob
Ralink is a company which manufactures the chipsets for dozens of popular 802.11x devices. They do indeed provide drivers (and source) for linux:
n _Page
http://www.ralinktech.com/supp-1.htm
they also provide a nice table, with links to the manufacturers
http://ralink.rapla.net/
AND they have an open source project, as well, to support the drivers!
http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/wiki/index.php/Mai
check it out. it's cool.
Applications using alsa doesn't suffer such problems. Stop using apps that use /dev/dsp directly....
OK so you want developers to break compatability with non-Linux platforms and you want users to abandon their software and just use something else (ignoring the fact that in a lot of cases "something else" doesn't exist, is broken, unreliable, unsupported, etc)?
Makes sense... And after all, people porting code to run on other OS's *really* enjoy re-writing huge chunks of Linux specific junk...
Perhaps you should have found out the dismal support part before you purchased the adapter. Duh.
Hm. And people wonder why I say Linux isn't ready for the desktop.
Or worse, laptop.
I hadn't realized how little support there was for wifi under linux until I got an old Inspiron 3800 laptop. Installed Fedora Core 4 on it. I spent many hours looking for driver supported cards. I finally hit upon MadWifi that others have mentioned here. It doesn't support passphrases but you can use wpa_supplicant for that (though I haven't got it working). I went to the MadWifi site looked at the list of cards. Wrote down a few and went to the local BestBuy. I ended up with a NetGear WG511T and after downloading the correct RPM's that would support it under Fedora Core 4. I got it working after a couple of hours of fiddling around I got connected. The next thing I wanted to get working was the Cisco VPNClient. I did manage to get it to compile, but when I fire it up it locks the computer up so hard I have to turn it off. I tried VPNC and it doesn't work either.
Sorry too lazy tonite to provide the relevant links and exact versions of what right now. My advice is to look for what linux wifi drivers are available then what cards they support, find out if the card will work with the computer you want to put it in, then buy the card and then fiddle with the software whether you have to compile them or use RPM's for your distro.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
should be renamed HobbyOS. Not everyone is a fat douchebag like you with nothing better to do than spend hours fucking around with their computer to make it do something Windows and MacOS were doing with ease years ago. Do yourself a favor and just install Windows or MacOS. With all that extra free time you might by some miracle find some way to finally get your dick wet.
Before you throwing in the towel, check out the following website:
/.'ers!!
s p
http://zd1211.ath.cx/
(It used to be hosted at http://zd1211.sourceforge.net/ before moving to this new site.)
This project was started a while back to support the ZyDAS ZD1211 chipset in Linux. As it states on the site, the code was originally donated by ZyDAS. Sometime last year, I managed to contact their tech support and request another kind gesture to the open source community. A few emails later, they released an update to their original code. If I'm not mistaken, the version at the project's website has incorporated the improvements made in the company's updated code. The ZD1211 project also has a list of USB adapters that carry the ZD1211 chipset.
After checking out the project's website, check out the vendor's page as they have been keeping up with their pledge of helping out the open source community by releasing updated drivers. As a bonus, they have also released an updated **WPA Supplicant**. Enjoy fellow
ZyDAS' ZD1211 download page:
http://www.zydas.com.tw/downloads/download-1211.a
Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with ZyDAS. I just believe it is commendable that a company responded to a request to support the open source community and is actively doing so by publishing updated drivers.
Good luck to us all!
I have an orinoco 802.11b pcmcia card that works out of the box in debian. It has given new life to my aging dell inspiron laptop.
Minor correction:
"Before you throwing in the towel"
Should read:
"Before you throw in the towel"
Also, the project still has a page at Sourceforge. It's at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zd1211
The images that you see describe what should be done to you.
Linux's greatest weakness is its poor support for wireless devices. It doesn't matter who's fault it is. But I wonder if the Linux community has any solutions or strategy. Why not a device standard interface? Why not sue Prism and other chip makers for anti-trust?
I have been buying Suse distros for years now. I'm trying to support Linux because I thought it had a chance of providing schools and the poor with a good alternative. But I have NEVER got it to work wirelessly and wireless is like a basic feature these days. But don't forget that Linux LAN connects are also a pain to set up but they work sort of. There doesn't seem to be a way to set up multiple NICs and EASILY switch between them. At least I have never got it to work but its easy on Windows.
But it is really silly that in 2006 its so hard on Linux to do these simple things like use removable media, of use several NICs, or mount a drive. Why are these things so hard? That's why my distro is collecting dust as I type on one of my 3 XP boxes. *sigh* It doesn't matter why it doesn't work...it just doesn't but my XP always does, security holes and all but at least it works.
Oh well, maybe in another 10 years Linux will be ready.
The Wi-Fi manufacturers need to quit acting like children and publish their interface specs.
http://outcampaign.org/
Sorry folks, but most of you do nothing but whine about the fact that you have been too stupid to follow the first golden rule of linux hardware support:
"Google first, buy later!"
No matter if its graphics cards, external usb hardware, or wireless networking, you can save yourself all the fiddling and trouble if you follow that rule, and look what's supported FIRST, then buy a piece of hardware where you can be sure that it works.
I've been following this rule for quite a while, and behold, the only time I was having hardware bellyache was with some kind of usb wlan stuff that I got because of the shop having confused my order somehow, and which I didnt send it back because I thought "a kit of 2 USB wlan dongles for the price of one 4port usb 1.1 hub, good deal."
Every other piece of hardware I bought has been googlechecked to be working on linux BEFORE I bought it, and with no exception has been working with little to no problems, right out of the box.
After you have got the hardware supported your real problems begin. There are not usable user interface tools to get things like WPA2 and 802.1x working. You got to do it all the early 90s way. :(
don't go down the high street then... search out guys like these, and use them... they actually test the things and make sure they work with Linux...
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
This article clearly states that he bought the item within a small period of time before he tried to use it on linux. Odds are it doesn't even work on half windows versions, yet this uneducated, lazy kid thinks someone else will do all the work of writing drivers for all the usb (why?) wireless adapters out there.
Think about the problem here. If the trend of smart people disregarding their obvious responsibility continues, we will see truely chaotic problems; People will buy lawnmower sparkplugs for their bmw's! Stock racing teams will start using stock tires (what a novel concept!) to avoid problems in case it starts raining at daytona 500! Pilots everywhere will fly to the wrong airport because they forgot to check their flight maps. The Fire Department will leave their hq without any hoses!
Somewhere someone has to take responsibility, and believe it or not, that somebody isn't "anyone but me."
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
Broadcom is one of the only vendors that doesn't provide a mechanism for native Linux drivers.
;)
Personally, I've never been happy with Broadcom's chips, and even less happy that they refuse to support the Open Source community even with a closed-source or partially closed-source driver. Even Atheros is supporting us with MADWifi and their closed-source HAL... Broadcom could do something similar.
Most of the projects either have support from chip vendors (Intel, Atheros, Agere) or there has been some reverse engineering done (TI).
TI ACX1xx chips: http://acx100.sourceforge.net
Intel Centrino chips: http://ipw2100.sf.net and http://ipw2200.sf.net
Atheros-based chips: http://madwifi.org
I think the wrapper stuff is interesting for the geek factor, but it makes me shudder when people (who don't really know what they are doing) try to use it as an end all be all solution for their wireless needs in Linux, but I'm happy for those who have actually been able to make this solution work for them.
My advice is to shop around very careful, and choose a card that does what you need it to... don't just go with the cheapest thing you can find. A lot of OEM cards have the same chipsets... you can still find some decent stuff for cheap, but it's quite likely you'll run into something that doesn't have good Linux support.
You mean, "with Linux (x86)"? Hacks are not the solution in the long term. We need open drivers, and at least freely distributable firmware files (if not open ones because of regulation).
Of the 802.11g hardware (pci/usb/pcmcia), Symbol, Zydas and Atmel allow firmware distribution with okay terms, people should support them. Also, Ralink, Atheros and Realtek have cards that do not require the firmware to be distributed. Intel, TI, Conexant and Broadcom should be boycotted for their stupid policies of not allowing eg. Linux distributions or BSDs to distribute the firmware files without specific agreement (which they can choose not to make). Yes, even Intel though it has nice drivers otherwise.
Driver situation varies, but as pointed out eg. RT2500-based cards (see http://ralink.rapla.net/) are a good choice, as are probably Atheros-based cards (madwifi) and Atmel-based cards. Zydas drivers, even though GPL, have been unstable for long, even though there are both a manufacturer-provided GPL driver and a community-supported one - the co-operation just hasn't been fluent until perhaps now.
And it has to be remembered, that even the freely distributable firmware file is not currently the optimal solution, because it's a binary blob with no source and there are no rights to modify it. But perhaps we just have to live with a few "restricted" blobs (like the terminology in Ubuntu) when it comes to the hardware firmwares - our graphics cards also have closed firmwares etc. At least a device firmware is a lesser threat to freedom than closed drivers like the binary graphics drivers.
The only way I found to get a desktop to access any type of wireless device, is by using a wireless bridge. These are a wireless client on one side, RJ45 wired network on the other and cost about the same as a wireless adapter. You then just plug a patch lead into it and the linux box will never know it is going wireless. Mind you, it's a bulky solution for a laptop...
Radio on your iPod
Applications using alsa doesn't suffer such problems. Stop using apps that use /dev/dsp directly....
You can't tell end-users that! They wouldn't know what you're talking about.
Support for any sound interface that IMPLICITLY monopolizes the soundcard must be FIXED OR REMOVED. No app should get an exclusive lock on audio unless it specifically requests that condition!
From your link:
So, if you have a Linux kernel driver that is not in the main kernel tree, what are you, a developer, supposed to do? Releasing a binary driver for every different kernel version for every distribution is a nightmare, and trying to keep up with an ever changing kernel interface is also a rough job.
Simple, get your kernel driver into the main kernel tree (remember we are talking about GPL released drivers here, if your code doesn't fall under this category, good luck, you are on your own here, you leech)
This is EXACTLY the reason why companies do not support linux. 6 months ago, my company (a fairly large semiconductor firm) was considering releasing generic Linux drivers. I advised against this because we'd never recover development costs.
Re: modems, the world doesn't revolve around your personal experience. Check any discussion forum of a deskop distro and you will see loads of people pleading for help with modem drivers (yes, they are winmodems).
/dev/dsp directly.
Ehm, and what about the several sound servers that exist? This is simply bullshit. The only problem is with older applications that use
You mean like Skype and Audacity?? I think you have your head in the sand.
What I find a bore is the way Desktop Linux adoption never gets anywhere, because the core community is purblind and numb to crucial usability details. Like a single standard (a platform!) that people can name when they buy/download things for their computer. Not ALSA+SMB+SATA+etc...
Jeff Garzik(kernel developer) has a very enlightening LKML post/rant about why wireless in the linux kernel is not yet quite up to par:
6
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.linux.network/3175
Does your wireless recipe include WPA?
do you have any usb recommendations that are WPA compatible?
"On some systems (Acer notebooks notably), adapter initialization sometimes fails due to IRQ routing problems and interference with the video display. The current workaround is to run "modprobe driverloader" before the X server starts or with the display switched to a text-console (Ctrl-Alt-F1)." -- Linuxant
Mod points are a dangerous tool. Abuse them wisely.
Will everyone *please* calm down.
:)
1.I am certainly no zealot. It's a bit of software for gawds sake - I like them all
2.I was not Linux bashing (Bash-ing - pun not intended) - just merely pointing out a problem *I* had with Linux - of course it's fix-able - everything is if you put a bit of time & effort into it.
3.I've also had umpteen problems with XP through the years (zealot - moi?).
4.I like the current Virtual Machine solution 'cos I can play with both toys at the same time - if I didn't have this option I'd spend some time fixing the wifi prob.
5.All my laptops default boot into Linux - so... n'yah! (nothing like a childish comment when you can't think of anything intelligent to say)
Now - lets go out and play nicely.
99% of people won't notice the difference, they'll get market strength because of the lower price (because you're buying less), and hey, whaddya know, no Linux support?
Why the hell would a shop stock an expensive Real-Modem when they don't sell? Hence, it's nearly impossible to get a dialup PCI modem that'll work with Linux.
Evil, but very smart.
Soundcard support is pretty decent, until you realize the OS often implicitly locks-out multiple apps from outputting audio... so uses involving alerts and alarms (timers, calendars, IMs, softphones, etc.) cannot be relied upon. Obviously this is also an obsctruction for musicians and DJs. But ya gotta maintain compatability with 1991 apps so the brokenness stays.
I can't imagine any musician or DJ who would want alerts/alarms/phonecalls to be able to play sound while working. He would want his multitrack recording / playback software to have full control over the sound card while using it.
It's one of the things I hate about windows, and I'm not even doing any sound editing, just listening to an MP3 in winamp, and suddenly one of those annoying system sounds gets mixed with the music. Ruins everything.
Having everything mixed is probably fine for a desktop system, but a musician would definitely want his program to be the only one with access to the sound card. And thus the Linux again shows its strengths, by allowing both. A mucisian (or me) can have his program use the sound device directly, and a desktop system can use ESD to mix the boings with the music.
NVidia wrote this script that checks their ftp site for pre-compiled modules for kernel versions of all the major distros and if it doesn't find yours it recompiles the wrapper around the binary driver on-the-fly (meaning you need kernel source/headers installed and properly configured and even then it doesn't always work). On debian I even have to hand edit a header to add the arch of my platform (-k7) to the version string, because that's what they've done for the pre-compiled kernel, but it is not in the (arch independant) source... Now I figured this out and fixed it, but many other users wouldn't. And why does every patch have to be coded in the kernel version:
e.g. 2.4.21-32.0.1.nfswan2 (RHEL 3) instead of just 2.4.21 ??
Fortunately some workarounds can be found: as pointed out elsewhere, if you use a common distro you can find apt/yum repositories with pre-compiled modules for the pre-compiled kernel versions (I use this now for NVidia). It does mean that you're usually a couple of versions behind, but I guess most people can live with that (I can). Still, it would be a lot easier (for users and vendors) if the modules were numbered by API/major kernel version, rather than kernel/patch/arch/phase of the moon version...
I love linux, I use it as my main operating system, I think its just the best.. But.. Why is it that we rely on windows software so much, and we insist on making windows things work for us, why dont we just do better than windows instead of copying everything
Jeff Garzik posted on LKML on January the 5th a lengthy article about the state of linux Wireless. See here.
John W. Linville claimed the responsibility for Wireless support in the kernel. The archive of the LKML thread is available here.
Hopefully is this going to improve things...
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent - Salvor Hardin
hi, Have you tried ndiswrapper yet? This is an open source wrapper. I've used it ith my Broadcom wlan-card, but this wasn't a USB card. I think the general idea of installing a driver should be the same for your USB-card. If you want you can take a look at my "zv6251EA" howto 's on http://members.home.nl/ruudbeukema/techniek/linux/ . It includes setting up the wlan card using ndiswrapper.
Good luck!
against the fritz!wlan usb stick which has sourcecode drivers for linux directly from the vendor
also good are the intel 2100/2200 chipsets for wlan, and as you had seen the prism ones.
also check the kernel sources for more supported wlan usb sticks, as i myself prefer to use pcmcia/internal chipsets
never needed ndiswrapper, i have d-link, compaq and intel wlan chipsets here at use, and i had installed the fritz!wlan usb stick for a friend on linux
Or to put it in another way, how to install your linux wireless device:
0. Ask around your linux friends how you could install a wifi device, they tell you to search the web and read lots of man pages
1. Buy cheapest device you can find, don't spend ANY time looking at websites mentioning supported wifi chipsets for linux (*)
2. Complain on slashdot that it doesn't work on linux, and the wireless support must be crap.
3. Everyone in linux-guru land givea you step-by-step explanations on what to do.
4. Profit!!!!
(*) really, you would have found that the prism54 is one of the more expected ones to be supported, I did the same some time ago, BEFORE going to the store
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
The driver from Realtek does not work.
First, it will only load with a specific version of a RedHat kernel (2.4.whatever). Kernel updates for bug fixes? Forget it.
Now with the right kernel it may work for some cards.
But the driver supports te chipset memory mapped or I/O mapped. Mostly.
So if the card needs I/O mapped, there is (at least) one function that will try memory mapped, resulting in a kernel fault.
And the vendor support doesn't care.
Alsa breaks one of the best Unix principles: everything is a file. I do not want to have a different API for each device. I want to have exactly the same model for all, open a file, write to or read from it. To use a different device, just change the file name. Use ioctl for control functions. Alsa breaks this beautiful model.
In the Unix way, a software can process sound that comes from an audio card in exactly the same way as it handles sound that was recorded to a file, just change the file name from
Snicker... I notice no one has stepped up and given props to Intel for helping to get the Centrino stuff to work well with linux....
Well it does.
You may decide you want to hate their chips, but they do try guys...
Actually, ALSA supports software mixing (and hardware mixing on some hardware) of different sound applications; see information on its dmix plugin. When used in conjunction with ALSA's OSS emulation, this allows (most) sound-using applications to co-operate.
I've seen this belkin wireless G usbkey (with weird stand when used with a desktop ) about 5 times recently, in all cases it wouldn't work with windows first time. Some found that reinstalling would fix this, but i've had one guy tell me now that its once again failed to work.
How can anyone be expected to get something working in linux when it doesn't even work properly in windows? This has gravely tarnished the amazement i had for belkins cheap, but stuff that works (were they formally Q-tec? or did Q-tec just go bust?)
The reason i saw 5 of these usb keys? I "help out" with the wireless in our student accomadiation, one of the 3 computer shops in our city center only stocks this as their 54G answer (however they do have others if you "order" but their prices are overhyped anyway).
Plus the general linux user has learn to check something works before attempting to use it in linux, im personally looking for a new motherboard, but waiting until im better before i commit my self.
- http://www.milkme.co.uk
"During the search for clues..."
If you've found only those 2 (first being for now almost obsolete card, 2nd being commercial) URLs after "search for clues" - I feel sorry for you.
What's going on here? People are too lazy to even make a Google search, so they post a Slashdot "article"?
Amusing...
Worked out of the box (server and reciever) for me until Iand was considerably faster than the Airport I replaced it with when my last PC box died.
Zero Sum (don't amount to much). [root@localhost]
It's a Ralink chipset card. I'm using it at right this second and it's been absolutely great including WPA encryption. Cheap card, runs at 54mbps here.
Deleted
Buy hardware that is natively supported in Linux. Vote with your dollars. Eventually the 1% linux share will make a difference to the bean counters.
My post was in response to dingletec's... Notice the quote in italics. :)
Not that this excuses the harshness of my post, but I was a little irritated as I'm sure you can understand because you were prompted to defend yourself a number of times.
Exactly. Mod this one up.
Linksys WRT54G and GS (v4 or prior) running Thibor12 HyperWRT or DD-WRT work great. The Belkin g F5D7230-4 routers can also be setup as AP's with WDS links.
I've found this to be much more reliable and robust than running a wireless card under Linux.
The issue in this case is that the general networking maintainer doesn't get excited about wireless, and until a few weeks ago, there wasn't a wifi maintainer. So there's actually a lot of support for wifi written, but it hasn't gotten into the kernel, because none of the drivers are quite up to the maintainability standards of the kernel, and nobody'd been organizing fixing this.
However, there's now a new maintainer for wifi, and he's been arranging discussion on getting all of this cleaned up and into the kernel, so it should change soon.
Makes sense... And after all, people porting code to run on other OS's *really* enjoy re-writing huge chunks of Linux specific junk...
Oh well. People porting code to run on other OSs enjoy when linux rewrites large parts of linux-specific junk; and users say linux it sucks because Linux keeps using the same useless standard crap that OSS is. I'd rather have a technoloy that doesn't sucks than one that sucks but is portable.
Makes sense... And after all, people porting code to run on other OS's *really* enjoy re-writing huge chunks of Linux specific junk...
Contrary to what you may think, Linux users don't want Linux to be a dumping ground for Windows, Solaris, and Macintosh applications. The primary thing that ports and (so-called) cross platform applications do is degrade the user experience on Linux.
If you aren't willing to rewrite huge chunks of your application to make it work well in a Linux/X11 environment, do us all a favor and don't bother porting it to Linux at all.
They shouldn't compensate with "new" drivers that cover up the fact that the "same" model is nothing of the sort. Many of the USB WiFi adapters are actually supported- Hawking's is one example at this point. One of the "cheap" vendors took it upon themselves to provide an open sourced Linux driver. The PCMCIA landscape's a little iffy- but if you stick with Prism based cards (Yes, more expensive, but they're much better performers) you've got no issues there either as Intersil gifted us with the same thing, fully open sourced drivers. Broadcom's the biggest bad-boy in this story, with most of the integrated laptop WiFi chipsets being provided by them. Considering that most of the other players are also using software defined radios, there's really no excuse for them not stepping up to the plate with at least regular official binaries for Linux- if not source code. Their reason's BOGUS.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
At the same time, I happen to be part of Debian, so I can answer that quoted part: time. I would love to start a huge project to list compatibility for every conceivable piece of hw around... but unfortunately my day is still 24h (notwithstanding any attempt of upgrading it to 26h) so I know that I will never have the time to do that.
Anyway, here is my list of TODOs
- catch up with overdue work
- fix the remote on my Linux PVR (I hate soldering and it shows)
- discuss with ftpmasters, solve problem, so that "mplayer" gets into Debian,
- implement "debdiff" "debpatch" to create diffs of Debian packages (I did some work some time ago and it was very promising!)
- start the most fantastic HCL of all inside Debian
and, do not forget (0) have some fun with family and friends.So you have to wait in queue.
The problem is that the damn hardware manufacturers change chipsets more often than their underwear, and don't bother changing anything else at all. Like, oh, the name, or the part number.
Which, I should point out, is the entire damn point of a part number.
You know, I hate government interference as much as the next guy, but selling two pieces of computer hardware as exactly the same thing, when one of them uses completely different hardware (And I don't mean 'updated', I mean provided by someone else.) should not be legal. You should be required provide some manner of identifing between the old and the new.
Basically, it's false labeling. You have the right to stop selling a product, but you don't have the right to lie to me and say this is the same thing as I bought previously, especially for things designed to interface with other things that I may be counting on to work as they did before.
And it's completely absurd that we would actually get to the point we need a law in this regard because companies want to keep using the same catalog and boxes, but also want to save two dollars.
Incidentally, the only other manufacturer I know that does this is car companies, who sometimes change things in the middle of a model year.(1) But that's usually fix problems, not to save two dollars, and cars don't need to work with other things, unless they've designed half the model year to take diesel or drive on the other side of the road. But I'd be willing to support such a requirement for them, also.
1) I have a 'stupid engine design Pontiac Sunbird 1993' instead of a 'good engine design Pontiac Sunbird 1993'. the difference being that it takes four hours of work to open the engine instead of one, because you have to take, apparently, every damn thing out from under the hood before you can do so. I also ended up with a 1982 Ford S-10 with an 83 engine, and we're not exactly sure why or how that happened, although it's possible that's a replacement.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
It's a valid point, even if we're not listening properly. WiFi is pretty much de-facto now - you can expect most people to want WiFi.
And yet, the support for it is *crap*. Unlike almost everything else, where the open source community have come up with good solutions (and in some cases, in partnership with manufacturers) to these problems, Linux WiFi sucks.
Buy a graphics card tomorrow; it probably works. People who know little will be able to use it.
Buy a sound card tomorrow; it probably works. Ditto.
And go all the way down the parts list, including physical network cards, and you'll have the same response. Go within ten feet of WiFi, and you're gambling - there's a 50/50 chance it works. And if it does work, it may require you to do something rather unusual - to use Windows drivers, because there aren't any for Linux.
Honestly? ndiswrapper is the worst thing to happen to Linux OSS in a long time - it's meant that people can wave their hands and call it "solved", without actually solving it for most of the population of non-technical users.
It's a shame, really, that we're at this crossroads so late - yet, here we are, and it's fourth and inches from ndiswrapper being EOL. With no general solution for how to improve WiFi for the majority of users once it goes.
Let's face it folks: Something needs doing, and the OP has a point, even if he didn't know he was making it.
-- A mind is a terrible thing.
I'd say a fair majority of commercial developers have already taken your advise. Hey, thanks!
The world according to SComps
What do you mean, you want to use it for dialup? It's a frickin sound card! How about you just hold the phone over your computer speakers? It makes just as much sense and is cheaper.
In my laptop, the sound card and the 'winmodem' are the same device, and they both operate under ALSA!
And they neither modulate nor demodulate, so are, indeed, not 'modems'. They have a DAC and ADC in them, but the (de)?modulation is done inside the computer.
1) Does anyone know why the hell all 'winmodems' aren't automatically 'voice modems'? Why can't you record and play audio to them? Would that really been so hard a feature to include?
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Or you mean they have both, and they are conflicting with each other?
Wait. Do you mean they think they have a modem, and don't? I can see how they might be complaining if they think they have a modem and that Linux simply doesn't see it, but I don't know what you want Linux to do about it. Possibly it could pop up a big red box that says 'No, you really do not have a modem, stop bothering me.'?
Obviously, it would be nice if the winmodem people would stop putting the word 'modem' in the name, then people would be less likely to mistakenly think they have a modem, but people have been complaining about that for years and nothing's gotten done.
The modem drivers are actually pretty good on Linux. They've got multi-port support, all sorts of tweaking possible, and in general the whole thing just works out of the box. (Of course, normal modems tend to work out of the box on any OS, so it's not some amazing accomplishment. It's only the weird multi-modems with IRQ sharing and stuff that sometimes have problems.)
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
The OSDL has started a site to help people and vendors write drivers and to list existing driver: http://developer.osdl.org/dev/opendrivers/. Not much on wifi yet but it's a wiki so add what you know now! Maybe someone could write a little app that people could run on their boxes to see what's working and send the report to OSDL...
Which doesn't always work. I bought a card that was supposed to be supported. I struggled with it for a couple of weeks. I *finally* found out that I had a new version of the same model card, and it wasn't supported. Since I bought it as a bundle deal with the router, I just said "f it" and reinstalled Win2k on the laptop.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
I remember trying to get WiFi working on my laptop under Linux, and what a huge, huge pain in the ass it was. I had a sort of off-brand card, and I managed to get it to turn on, and detect a couple hotspots, but I was never able to connect and use the 'net. I tried for days to get it to work, and did use ndiswrapper, but I just couldn't find good info on how to have it scan and connect, even using some of the more automatic tools. Yes, I understand that Linux is still more for power users, but when you have to spend 2-3 days to get wi-fi up and running, vs 3 min with Windows, its hard to convince people to give it a try.
"A coward dies a thousand deaths, the brave but one."
Wireless LAN is all about convenience, and if convenience is what you're about then windows is for you. Or perhaps apple's birdbrained airport system...
Wireless has reduced functionality in many respects. Heck coax is superior to UTP, but convenience wins out over quality every time.
Technology is a consumer market, the same people who watch Days or Lives and WWE are the ones driving the electronics market now.
Want to run a proper Unix? Forget Redhat and that wireless crap. For reliability and integrity try FreeBSD or QNX on a coax LAN, rock solid and secure.
It still irritates the hell out of me that doughbrained users and lazy techs resulted in UTP winning out over coax.
Wireless sucks, that is all.
have no problems at all right now getting my 'centrino' package cards to work in Linux nativly, but last i checked, i still cant get WPA support on them.
http://kerneltrap.org/node/6053
The Linux kernel guys are WAAAAY behind OpenBSD on this front, and I partly blame ndiswrappers for this. Because there is a brutal hack available that lets you use the windows drivers, there has been little to no incentive to actually create native solutions.
I'm glad that the OpenBSD guys put so much effort into sorting out binary licences with vendors so that they can do native kernel drivers.
I can't imagine anyone who still have the damn stupid sounds turned on.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
I have a Belkin F5D6050, and it works fine with the atmel driver from http://innominate.org/kurth/at76c503/ . I've also found linux native drivers for my laptop, so they're out there, it just a pain finding them. I would think one of the problems is, that the manufacturers don't bother writing linux drivers, because they count on FOSS people writing some for them, and users don't complain enough.
Everything-is-a-file is all very well until you want real-time-ish multimedia mixing.
Everything-is-a-file is all very well until most of "everything" is done via ioctl's rather than file IO.
I'm happy enough to have software mixing (at last), and to be honest, playing sound asyncrhonously is best NOT done with writing some wav fragments to a file, using syswrite and select to avoid blocking, and then hoping the select loop re-enters soon enough to syswrite the next block in time. Much nicer to have an api to queue a wav fragment, and maybe with callbacks to get some more.
Sam
blog.sam.liddicott.com
The reason WLAN support has been sucking for a long time is that the WLAN adapters whether they're PCMCIA or USB have very very stupid chips inside them from Atheros, Atmel, Prism, Broadcom, etc.
They're pretty much just a radio, an IF, and a MAC. Because the manufacturers wanted to save money and sell their chips all over the world, they rely on a closed-source object called a HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) so you can't turn up the power to unreasonable or illegal levels, or use channels outside what that country specifies.
Linux, being open source, hates the fact that these companies bent over to the FCC and equivalents and only released a closed source HAL object in order to keep hackers from violating the UNII restrictions on frequency and power. I'm banging on doors at a large mfr. of USB sticks to get driver people on the horn so I can use their 802.11 USB stick in a commercial portable device that runs Linux. They're not cooperating.
'Be always mindful, even when ditch-digging.' --D. T. Suzuki
Linux users don't want Linux to be a dumping ground for Windows, Solaris, and Macintosh applications
This is demonstrated by WINE and Crossover Office being total failures and nobody ever using the Linux ports of Oracle, Veritas and VMWare right?
The primary thing that ports and (so-called) cross platform applications do is degrade the user experience on Linux.
Damn and I thought X11, X.org, KDE, Gnome, Mozilla, Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, GCC, the GNU utilities and Exim (to name but a few) were a good thing... Still, if you don't like using cross platform applications it's your loss. Just out of interest, which X server do you use? I've never heard of any stable ones which have been developed from the ground up to be Linux-only...
It doesn't work that way in real life. Most apps that use OSS access /dev/dsp and will lock-out the ALSA-using apps anyway.
The user must take pains to run their audio application with a wrapper prefix like 'artsdsp' or 'artsdsp -m' (depending on the kind of app). Even then, the results can be awful (timing errors and choppy audio).
This is something end-users are not likely to do. If you leave it up to the distro people, then you can't count on your audio apps working unless it comes from your distro's centralized repository (the typical Linux scenario where not much works for unskilled end-users unless they remain in the distro vendor's walled garden).
It is far better for a phone app to fail completely when someone first runs it, than to intermittantly fail the end-user by not being able to RING.
Stop facilitating broken infrastructure. Fixed the old decrepit thing, or REMOVE it!
Linux has no business preventing audio playback unless a critical app specifically requested exclusivity! Broken legacy interfaces are still BROKEN.
Like the SUSE LINUX: Hardware compatibility list?
http://cdb.novell.com/?LANG=en_UK
They have had a database with compatible hardware online at least since version 6.2, when I started using SuSE (1998).
But I do not find any WiFi cards in that database.
RogerWilco the Adventurous Janitor
Why should using /dev/dsp lock out ALSA apps, or even other OSS apps for that matter?
Either way, on my SuSE 10.0 installation (with an SB Audigy), running RealPlayer, XMMS and Quake 3 all at once (all of which should be outputting to OSS) seems to work absolutely fine. There's nothing fundamentally wrong with the infrastructure I can see, at least.
The Audigy is a relatively expensive sound card with multiple hardware channels. I know some Linux fans may think everyone should pay $50 and up for audio output (in addition to paying 8x as much for dialup hardware in the form of an external controll-endowed modem). Meanwhile create types will continue to cut their teeth on Windows and Mac, and continue to stay away from Linux because of its atrocious audio behavior.
/dev/dsp device. Gosh I guess Apple is doomed after all! How dare they leave that "beautiful" file-oriented driver out of their operating system??
Also,for those interested: I just checked my OS X system and there is no
I am so missing it. NOT.
If you had written this before ALSA 0.9.6 you might have had an argument. Now you are spouting old inaccurate information. Almost any modern Linux system sets up (automatically) and uses the dmix and dsnoop plugins provided by ALSA to provide seamless, low latency mixing of any number of input streams, regardless of whether the actual physical device is capable of handling hardware mixing or whether the application is using hard-linked memory mapped access to the sound card (like Quake!). You don't need an Audigy or other "extra" sound card to do this - my cheapo intel mobo sound card chip i810 system works fine with three or four apps chucking sound at it. I run music 24x7 on that box. Alerts beep, mixed in with the music. Speech synthesis mixes in (using Festival, which knows nothing about the actual setup I have driving the audio). ALSA has, for the most part, delivered what people needed - good support for audio for home user and professional cards (like the RMEs).
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
In my experience hardware engineers write the best drivers. After all, we build the hardware, we know how to control it. Damn uppity software weenies.
Zealot? Bashing? Where does that come from?
Didn't I say it's a matter of perspective? I was responding to the comment:
I just don't get the whole "Linux is all I use" mentality. Why make life hard?
If you consider my comments "bashing", you must live a sheltered life...
I believe I also said something to the effect that however "hard" an OS is, it is a matter of perspective. I reread my post and see nothing critical toward the parent.
The fact that I have not spent time installing Antivirus, Adware/Spyware removal tools, or even had to worry about it makes my statement a fact. Disconnecting Windows from the network is the only way to achieve the same results. No bashing here, simply pleasant statements of fact... And an easily provable one.
--dingletec--
oh my god, you are a complete fucking zealot.
I am a hardware engineer. I NEVER promised that my device works under linux - we never released specs because it's not worth our time. Someone managed to put together a half-functional driver (Impressive I'll admit) and suddenly our product 'supports' linux according to dozens of web sites. It turned into a support nightmare - the driver was buggy and people kept perstering us to release specs. Thry just couldn't take 'no' for an answer.
Six months later we identified a small hardware bug. We fixed it and I 'accidently' broke compatibility with the linux driver (I hate zealots). Our device does everything it says on the box. Our target market (windows) will never notice anything different. Linux users are completely screwed because its going to take _months_ to bypass our security. But guess what? We never promised Linux users it would work. Don't you DARE say we should have to waste thousands of dollars every time a hardware revision is made.
How you were critical of the parent:
Telling him to use linux for a few years more when it was clear that he was a fairly well seasoned linux user. Patronizingly adding quotes around the word "hard" as though he doesn't know what "hard" is because he's too inexperienced. That's bashing in my book. Sorry. Try adding a little tact and subtracting a little assumption next time.
How you're a zealot:
Making unqualified statements about windows to pump up your precious OS...being proven wrong...and continuing to stick to your guns.
I've got news for you... I'm one of the "ANY windows users" you referred to, and my experiences conflict with your little "fact." My dinky router provides plenty of protection while windows update automatically patches my box after installation. In fact, I bet the 'windows firewall' that's now bundled with the OS does a satisfactory job of this. My previous comments regarding never having had to install adware/spyware/virus removal/detection software still stand. Oh, and I've never "worried" about it either (like the quotes?).
You want to talk trash about windows? Fine... There are plenty of ways to do it, and I'll jump right in with you. How you've gone about it thus far, though? Not cool. Please stop.
I'm sorry, I assumed that your whole post was open to comment, or did you get off topic as well? I referred specifically to your comment about Linux being "hard". I believe I mentioned that it was a matter of perspective.
I don't consider myself an expert, but I do feel very comfortable with Linux. Enough to say I feel it is easier for me to use than Windows. Simply because I have used it for several years. Not sure what's wrong with that statement, but apparently I was wrong to say it. Glad I didn't say I was a Windows expert, everyone would jump down my throat then, calling me "holier than thou"... Or is it Windows that is holey(er)?
Congratulations on being a Unix programmer, you're obviously very proud of it. I don't think you're lying, I'm just not sure whether I'm supposed to be impressed or clap. It's hard to clap and type, though, so I'll just try to be impressed...
As far as I am concerned, that last bit was the only intentionally antagonistic statement I have made in this series of comments. So that's your cue to be offended and overreact.
--dingletec--
You're the one who read criticism into my comment, I didn't put it there. You assumed I was being critical and apparently used your imagination for the rest. I'm sorry you had to go to all that extra effort.
Making unqualified statements doesn't make someone a zealot, being excessively zealous does. You must have missed the part of my comment where I said that I WASN'T saying Linux was better, just that I was more comfortable with it. You know, the perspective thing... Or maybe you lack perspective.
So I guess I should apologize for the improper use of the word "any" (I like quotes). Such a small word, yet such a problem. You are apparently a type of Windows user I have never met, as in never getting viruses/worms/spyware/adware/etc.
I don't believe I have imagined being inundated by such things on the reasonably large number of Windows workstations at work. Or smiling and trying to look sympathetic while users describe problems they are having at home, knowing I'm about to tell them they will have to find someone else to work on their machines.
It's that perspective thing again. From my point of view, Windows looks like the plague. Kind of ironic, since I happen to be typing this while booted into the WinXP partition of my work laptop. I just noticed that. Oh well.
I use Linux a lot, but I also have systems here at home running OSX, FreeBSD, and Solaris. If it makes you feel better, I'll admit to some discomfort while using FreeBSD and Solaris. I never said Linux was better, just easier to me. Haven't Mac users been saying similar things for quite a while? Stinking zealots...
--dingletec--
You're mostly covered. I can accept the position you've taken. I apologize for being so harsh, and you're right...it is a matter of perspective (sometimes jaded).
From my perspective...it's the lazy, fearful, sometimes stupid, sometimes inexperienced users that are the plague. It just so happens that almost *all* of them are using Windows. Also, at one point...windows was exactly as you've described. In the past couple of years, it really has come a long way... Linux has done the same. Only, instead of in coming a long way on security/stability, it's been usability for linux. Both OS's still need to improve a little in these respective areas, but at this point if you're savvy, you can be happy with either one.
Okay, so I was probably right not to try and remember what it was from work. Here's the actual specs from the box.
It's a NETGEAR WG311 v3 (not a Linksys) but I was right in remembering that it had a Marvell chipset. Running lspci just reports "Ethernet controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd., Unknown Device".
The WG311 v2 is supported using the ACX100 drivers, but that was a different chipset. It seems as though there is zero native support for anything with the Marvell 'set. It's used in some other manufacturers cards as well, apparently.
To anyone in the market for a WiFi card: avoid this piece of crap like the plague if you can, and anything else which uses the same chipset. It's caused me nothing but frustration.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The Audigy may have hardware mixing, but if multiple programs can coexist on a sound card with hardware mixing, software mixing can be used in the driver to achieve the same thing. dmix in ALSA does this, more or less.
However, I will concede that the equivalent experiment failed on a machine with an integrated AC97-compliant Intel chip (RealPlayer blocked everything else). There is still room for improvement. However, the software and API used by the software do not, in my estimation, need to be rewritten.
It's not always that simple...
Some manufacturers clearly state the major chip on their product: "Lens&Mirror 802.11G card with Amazon 9000 chip."
Then there may be an Amazon 9000 version 1 and an Amazon 9000 version 2, which are pin-for-pin compatible and functionally equivalent - but while switching to version 2, the card manufacturer has also rewritten the firmware to take advantage of the additional features or improved performance of the v2 chip, or just to fix the more serious bugs, so the card is actually no longer the same.
This doesn't matter for Windows users, because the Windows driver is supplied with the card, and they make sure the old Windows driver works adequately. So they don't bother to change the card ID, to make sure it gets autodetected. And changing the packaging would be significant cost, so they just slap a small "v2" text somewhere in the artwork and raise the price by 30 %.
Then some manufacturers advertise the card as "Billy Joe Bob's Newfangled Wireless Thingy", never mentioning what it's built around, and when asked, just tell the user to install the drivers that come with the card, or failing that, reinstall Windows. The card ID is what it is. A product like this may eventually be reverse-engineered to reveal its identity and to produce a driver Billy Joe Bob didn't see fit to produce.
Then there's those companies who advertise six different chipsets as one product, or one chipset as six different products.
Then there's all kind of built-in and embedded things that may tie into the internals of a motherboard in all kinds of sick and twisted ways (read: manufacturers going for the record on making the largest feature with the fewest components. The winner is the one who makes the entire CPU in software...)
And in the middle of this mess is the poor open-source programmer spending nights in an excercise of frustration trying to write a driver for his laptop's WLAN card...
--js--
Usage: km/h for speed (kilometers per hour); kph for very slow impulses (kilopond hours).
Well, except for the fact you're lying.
Anyway, the assumption that you can do whatever you want to the hardware without telling people is not limited to effecting Linux users. It can screw up anyone who's bought your device in the past, and now buys your device, and it doesn't work exactly the same. Maybe they fixed your bug already, and your fix will screw up their fix. Or maybe they have the old, tested drivers on a disk image.
Hell, maybe they're selling your cards in their own white box computers, and are going to be doing technical support, and you've just wasted quite of lot of time of both them and their customers, and a lot of their goodwill, because these new cards have different problems that are not on the script, as opposed to your old problems, which were. And when the engineers build an 'identical' box to the customer's mysterious 'problem box', they, of course, might use an old one or a new one.
That is, in fact, the point of part numbers, and saying 'We're willing to spend huge amount of money on fixing hardware but none on changing the part number from 394-6325-2 to 394-6325-6.' is just idiotic. Part numbers are so people can order the exact same thing.
If you don't want to participate in the system, feel free to not actually have part numbers. Many things do not.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
ZyDas provided an open source driver for their
USB 802.11G chips.
Ralink appears to have done the same thing.
Since the drivers are still somewhat in their infancy, your mileage may vary, but it appears that both vendors (Which comprise many of the USB thumb sized adapters out there...) have stepped up to the plate and provided source and technical data to back it up with. There's been decent reports of usability with the Hawking model using ZyDas' chipset. At least for now, devices like the Hawking HWU54G adapter are largely supported in some mode that is remotely usable. I suspect that by the end of year that the driver sets for these two vendors' chips will end up in the kernel proper.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
or so i read on some linux guide on wireless. it makes sense, after all NICs are dirt cheap and cables too.
This thread is sort of amusing to read for me, because I just finished dealing with these issues.
What most people don't take into consideration is that Linux support for WPA encryption is even worse than it is for wifi devices in general. Its true that one is able to use ndiswrapper if there are no other drivers available, but ndiswrapper does not support WPA encryption. Granted, WPA encryption is not needed for a wireless connection, but since I use wireless at my apartment as my main internet connection, I really need some form of encryption to work, or else the entire building ends up sharing my connection with me. In these situations, I've resigned myself to using windows, simply because of the headache involved in getting Wifi with encryption to work reliably for a long period of time.
Soundcard support is pretty decent, until you realize the OS often implicitly locks-out multiple apps from outputting audio... so uses involving alerts and alarms (timers, calendars, IMs, softphones, etc.) cannot be relied upon. Obviously this is also an obsctruction for musicians and DJs. But ya gotta maintain compatability with 1991 apps so the brokenness stays.
Yes, by default a sound card can only take one sound input (assuming it is a run-of-the-mill card that lacks hardware mixing, not reasonably servicable card like *cough* my Audigy 2). This problem is easily solved by installing a simple sound daemon that will mix your multiple sound inputs, exactly like windows does by default. Some bizarre, fictitious compadability issue has nothing to do with this behaviour. It's all a matter of 1) hardware shortcomings and 2) not assuming that by default everone wants more daemons eating resources.
"Fight for lost causes. You may discover they weren't."
The Audigy may have hardware mixing, but if multiple programs can coexist on a sound card with hardware mixing, software mixing can be used in the driver to achieve the same thing. dmix in ALSA does this, more or less.
However, I will concede that the equivalent experiment failed on a machine with an integrated AC97-compliant Intel chip (RealPlayer blocked everything else). There is still room for improvement. However, the software and API used by the software do not, in my estimation, need to be rewritten.
My Xandros system is also configured with alsa-oss emulation and dmix with a recent release of alsa. It still doesn't prevent apps from seizing control of the sound output. Neither do the latest releases of desktop-oriented distros like Ubuntu and PCLinux. It seems the real OSS drivers haven't been deprecated just yet, so there is still potential for conflict.
I did some checking. Apparently, ALSA does lots of stuff (including dmix) in user space as part of the ALSA library, meaning that using the OSS devices bypasses dmix unless you do some funky stuff to override the system calls to send the data to the OSS library (aoss).
/dev/dsp just like on hardware mixed cards.
I wonder if it would be possible to change the OSS emulation devices to feed data into the ALSA library instead of directly into the kernel-level sound drivers. This would allow multiple open of OSS
X11, X.org, [...] Apache, MySQL, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, GCC, the GNU utilities and Exim
For practical purposes, those are UNIX apps that have been ported to Windows and OS X. No problem there for Linux users.
KDE [...] Mozilla
Yes, those two are poster children for why cross platform software sucks: KDE breaks a lot of Linux and X11 functionality, and the Mozilla apps are bloated, slow, and inconsistent with Linux, X11, KDE, Gnome, and OS X.
People put up with the Mozilla apps for now only because they have so much useful functionality. But make no mistake: native apps on Linux and OS X are increasingly replacing them.
Gnome
Gnome isn't really a cross platform system, it's Linux software that's been ported to Windows and OS X. Gnome has significant technical limitations, but they are not due to being cross-platform, and it's the best desktop you can get for Linux right now.
I'd say a fair majority of commercial developers have already taken your advise. Hey, thanks!
You don't have to thank them--they are not porting to Linux because they know they can't compete with the open source offerings. I mean, most Linux users don't use Acoread because it's so slow and awful, and that one is free even.
they're not porting because it's not taken seriously. Linux is an extremely robust platform; but unfortunately the vocal minority have chosen to take it to a level that's so extreme that it makes it nearly impossible for a corporation to participate. Citing acroread is completely absurd as it's a piece of crap in every environment. There's a lot of crap in the linux world as well. You can claim they can't compete, but I haven't seen any real proof. Much of the open source applications have been incomplete, poorly documented and focused on a small minority interest. That's the beauty of open source and any real community. People work on what's important to them. Commercial ventures tend to work on what's going to generate profit. Nothing's wrong with either, but trying to compare them is like comparing apples to squirrels. Why should I as a company finance the man hours for R&D to put a driver or application into the open source world to have it bastardized by developers that weren't part of the original R&D effort, used on competing hardware that by chance uses the same chipset as mine, and ultimately be vilified because I *am* a commercial venture and I might have chose not to use the license of the day? Ultimately it becomes a political, public relations and legal quagmire that most company's decide to avoid.
The world according to SComps
The open source Broadcom driver is VERY VERY close to being pretty much fully functional. Broadcom chipsets will not be paperweights on Linux much longer. Ndiswrapper is going to have to go away soon anyway...I'm not sure when it's going to happen, but I've heard that the Linux kernel is going to go to exclusively 4k stacks in an upcoming release (I'm not sure which one, 2.6.15 is still using 8k by default). Right now the default is 8k stacks, you can change it to 4k but this has to be done in the "kernel hacking" section of the config. Anyway, Windows drivers are usually written to expect 12k or greater stack sizes. Ndiswrapper seems to mostly work okay with the default 8k stack size, but once the kernel is switched to 4k, ndiswrapper will not work anymore. Native drivers are going to be necessary as soon as this change is made. Here's a thread on the native Broadcom driver: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-409194-highli ght-.html
This thread is mostly concerned with getting it working on ppc (since ndiswrapper only works on x86, ppc people don't have a choice and have to have a native driver), and it's mostly centered around Gentoo, but the driver developers are posting on there a lot and they're trying to track down specific issues with the driver. However, x86 people are also following this thread and posting on it. Right now I'm using the 0.0.1-20060105 snapshot (the only one Gentoo currently has in the portage tree). It *almost* works, I can bring my interface up, scan for access points, WEP and WPA are supported, it just has trouble actually associating with access points. Some people are having more problems than others, and some have been able to work around the problem by writing a shell script that hammers the interface until it successfully associates. The driver developers are working on this, once this is resolved it will be more functional than ndiswrapper.