OpenBSD Ahead of Linux for Wi-Fi Drivers

algae writes "It looks like some kernel developers have noticed that the OpenBSD project is including reverse-engineered drivers for wireless ethernet cards while Linux is still using binary blobs. A large part of the issue is that much OpenBSD development takes place abroad, where having to do clean-room reverse-engineering isn't as important." From the article: "Christoph Hellwig took another stance, 'please don't let this reverse engineering idiocy hinder wireless driver adoption, we're already falling far behind openbsd who are very successfully reverse engineering lots of wireless chipsets.'"

Comments

Almost on-topic! :) Wireless USB on Linux?

[timothy]

I have a few different wireless USB dongles; I have a netgear (model number slips my mind, and it's not handy) that's the size of a USB thumbdrive, and a few Proxim externals that are bigger -- they look a bit like a radio shark, and contain a full-sized PCMCIA card (Lucent, I think).

I know people handier with fooling around with their systems have gotten both of these models to work, but can anyone name a distro that makes USB wireless (within reason, as in "using widely supported devices," which I understand these both to be) truly plug and play? For some devices (old laptops with broken PCMCIA slots, shoebox machine with no free slots) USB's the only hope for getting wireless, but I've never found a distro that said "Hey, you've got a wireless USB dongle -- cool!" (even metaphorically).

timothy

MadWifi

[yanos]

For people using linux, just buy a card with a chipset supported by MadWifi. It works like a charm. Just be careful to watch for hardware revisions on the box of the wifi card you are planning to buy. Sometimes the chipset on the card will change with the model number being the same!