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The Battle for Wireless Network Drivers

Posted by timothy on from the mind-the-nazgul dept.

An anonymous reader points out this Jem Matzan article "about the pain Linux and BSD programmers have in trying to obtain/write device drivers for various wireless cards," writing: This article also has a fairly detailed explanation of how wireless firmwares and drivers work. Two of the manufacturers are actively working with the FOSS community without requiring an NDA."

3 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Just one bit of advice by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I was trying to get an [unnamed] card working.
    I spent days looking for drivers for this card.
    There were many comments negative about this card
    and it's drivers. I was mostly attempting to use
    "ndiswrapper" with a variety of versions of drivers
    for this card and chipsets.

    Hint: Turn OFF the security on the network.
    Test just the card. Not the boneheaded typo in the pass-phrase.

  2. Suggested Solution by pembo13 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Openly promote hardware companies that have fully functioning PCI, PCMCIA, and USB wifi cards in Linux. I will gladly spend my money with them regardless of wether I'm purchasing the hardware for myself or a friend, or for a Windows machine or a Linux machine. In the same way that HP printers almost always "just work" and Creative sounds almost always "just work", and I seek those brands out... I am willing to, and would do the same for other types of hardware. Of course for now, my purchasing quantities are quite small. But who's to say that they won't grow at some later point.

    --
    "Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
  3. Re:As someone that has been there by jridley · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If it wasn't for the 5-year warranty, I'd be looking elsewhere.

    I decided to start ignoring the warranty on drives.

    I mean honestly, if I have a drive fail, the LAST thing I'm worried about is whether I'll get my pissin' $70 back for a 250G drive. I want my DATA not a few bucks.

    I recently had my first real, hard, unpredicted (no SMART warnings) failure EVER out of dozens of drives from every manufacturer, and it was a 4 month old Seagate SATA drive. HP sent me a replacement, I put it in last night, and after 4 hours use the SMART data reads 4 hours spin time and 54 hardware ECC hits. I have 5 year old Maxtors (with 1 year warranties) that don't have 54 ECC hits.

    I don't care if they have a 100 year warranty; I don't care if they're giving them away for free; I'm not going to use drives I can't trust.

    I'm not buying any more Seagate for a while. Maxtor either since Seagate bought them. I think I'll buy WD for a while; I just picked up 2 of them and they're spinning nicely and behaving.