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The OSS Solution to the Linux Wi-Fi Problem
tobs writes "Matt Hartley of MadPenguin.org fame has published an open source way of solving the Linux Wi-Fi problem. He writes, "For intermediate to advanced users, who are willing to track down WiFi cards based on chipsets, live without WPA in some instances or have opted to stick with Ethernet, buying a new notebook for the sake of improved wireless connectivity may seem a little overkill.
When a new user faces problems jumping through the NDISWrapper hoops, tracking down WiFi cards from HCLs and other related activities, the end result is almost always the same — they give up. What so many of us, as Linux users, fail to grasp is that projects like OpenHAL are critical to long-term development. The education on what to expect and what not to expect remains a complete load of hot air when articles claim how easy it is to setup wireless Internet on Linux machines. It's downright misleading."
Since i have a Medion Mim with some proprietry medion chipset, i'm stuck with no wireless for ubuntu.. :(
the driver doesnt work with NDIS wrapper either...
of course...
that doesn't stop me using debian stable on my desktop!
www.tdobson.net #### Dare to Dream #### blog.tdobson.net
It's like I RTFA, but then again I don't feel like I RTFA. Anyone else notice that? Is there some "Page 2" button I'm missing?
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
After spending hours on breaking and re-breaking wifi on my laptop, I went out and bought a $20 wifi card with an Atheros chipset. It has worked flawlessly sense, without having to jump through the ndiswrapper hoops.
And any time someone new the *nix asks me about wireless, and why it isn't working, I always insist they spend the $20 on the Atheros chipset, as, again, it is damn near flawless.
What confuses me so much (and I really am ignorant in this department) is why the ethernet chipsets were seemingly conquered right off the bat? I tried my first Linux distro (debian) in 2001 and ever since then no matter what the machine, no matter what the distro, no matter how confused I was the NICs always came up ready to go when I installed Linux. I've done this on a lot of machines, from obscure to well known Dells and used most of the major distributions. They just 'worked' and it was good.
Now, wireless is here and for some reason, there must be a thousand different manufacturers with their own proprietary chipsets with completely different drivers & BIOS data on the flash memory stored in those chips because I've only had Ubuntu work once out of the box on a Linksys PCI WiFi card. Why? Why isn't that standardized? What do the companies gain from that? Is it because of the ever changing standards that the chips are so wacky? Is it because the A, B, G, N, etc. protocols? I don't understand this because I've never coded drivers.
I understand what MadWiFi & OpenHal are trying to do. I now know to look for "Atheros" chipsets when I buy my wireless stuff but they are often more well known brands and more expensive. A reason I switched to Linux was to save money in college, not spend more on the hardware.
Maybe a more helpful article would be detailing the real underlying issue--that these no name brands that get huge rebates at CompUSA or where ever (Hawking Technologies, generic boxes, etc.) are targeting Windows because of the number of users. How do you change their minds or show them a market for an OSS driver? Is there a way to even open up a channel of communication with them to discover how to write drivers for their chispets? How do you convince them it's worth their time/resources?
That would be a solution moving forward.
The next best thing would be to post an article about how to get started making these drivers. I'm a coder (though not the greatest one) with a little bit of free time. How do I start? How do I get access to the BIOS pages on the chipsets? What do I do with that, how does the Linux kernel use it? What books do I read that teach me how to start with a chipset I know nothing about, have no resources on the data or mechanics and then poke it, prod it until I know enough about it that I can set it up for the kernel to use it?
My work here is dung.
I'd be happy to see full Broadcom card support... I realize that Broadcom chipsets are shitty, but the overwhelming majority of systems I see are using them.
I actually bought an Atheros-based PCI-E wifi card for my laptop, because I knew I'd never get the Broadcom one working properly in Linux. Madwifi seems to work well enough, though.
Peace sells, but who's buying?
but it is a mess. When I upgraded from Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy my linksys 11b card stopped working. That doesn't inspire confidence. But I went out and bought an Asus card (11g this time) which said it supported linux on the side of the box. That worked with WEP, but there were still some hoops to jump through to get WPA working.
Now all laptops come with built in wifi things are even harder. I really don't want to be choosing my laptop based on what wifi chipset it uses (or having a card sticking out the side just because I can't get the internal wifi to work).
ccalam - acoustic versions of new songs.
I remember feeling that way around when the internet was gaining traction. It was so hard to find a linux compatible modem in stores since almost everything at the time was a winmodem piece of trash that let windows control everything and had almost no on board processing. I couldn't believe how many hardware vendors wouldn't be bothered to make standalone modems, instead opting for the cheaper windows only idea. Though with my current laptop I got lucky, had an atheros chipset that was supported by madwifi. Took some tooling around to get WPA-PSK to work; but it's ok now.
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
In fact, I am an experienced IT professional, and I have only a vague idea what you are talking about. The fact is, I do not spend my time studying the innards of Linux: I have other kinds of issues that I worry about. I am sure I could get a WiFi card working on Linux if I put my mind to it, and edit the right files, find the right drivers, and upgrade the BIOS as required, but I have no inclination to spend the many hours required to learn all those picky details - which I will then forget because I will not use them again. The fact is, if one has to do this, you can kiss Linux goodbye for the typical user. If Linux cannot be made to work with most (like 99%) built-in and third party devices (graphics, WiFi, sound, Bluetooth, etc.) out of the box or with *easily* found drivers - without having to edit files - then it is not a viable desktop for the typical home user. Further, it should be installable from Windows - without having to create an ISO disk and boot. These are far bigger issues than whether the scheduler is "fair" or whether the GUI is KDE or Gnome. Who cares if you can't get it running with an hour of point-and-click effort? It will then never be adopted by the masses, unless manufacturers decide to ship it pre-installed.
If something doesn't work, just look at the source code and correct the problem.
I just installed Fedora 7, and I am managing multiple wireless networks with NetworkManager, no configuration at all. Zilch.
Of course, I have a 5 year old Dell. People think they can buy whatever hardware they want and just have it work. No. You have to be selective. That's why my 3D desktop runs on Intel video.
Buy companies that support open source from the beginning, dammit, or other companies will never see the use of providing drivers or specs PERIOD.
Didn't I read somewhere that the OpenBSD project has made a great deal of progress creating open wireless drivers? Since it is a common cause, maybe the Linux developers should team up with them! =)
Are the three things I get embarassed talking about when trying to promote Linux to non-technical friends and family. All they want it "to do stuff". As the article mentions, they won't spend time fiddling with drivers, checking if the hardware will/might/won't work.
They have a real expectation that they can plug in whatever they choose to a PC and it will just work. This is their experience of (modern) MS and they won't accept any less from an alternative.
Until peripherals become seemlessly operable ordinary people will steer clear of Linux.
Until the applications (and I mean video playing in particular) just work, with no drama and no crashes (Kaffeine, why do you insist on popping up messages saying "The specified file or URL was not found", when you're playing it?) we're backing a loser.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
If you can get WiFi working but only if unsecured, try what I do to get around buggy NICs/drives under Windows that seem to forget security settings every now and again:
* leave the AP completely open
* run it through a Linux box on a separate NIC
* firewall on the Linux box, only letting DNS and OpenVPN packets through
* run OpenVPN, and route through that over the wireless
This is a lot of extra setup if you are doing it from scratch, and isn't something that a non-technical user will even care to think about, but if you are a techie and run a VPN solution anyway (which we do for secure access when we're further away, using public access points) the rest it easy. Your users already have the client, client config, keys and certificates - why waste time around fighting to get a less secure (especially if you are forced to use WEP rather than WPA for some reason) transport layer security scheme working when you can just use that?
You still need to make sure all the client machines are properly firewalled individually, of course, just in case some malicious user (or infected freeloader) tries to connect up, but who in their right mind connects a laptop to a wireless net (secure or not) without running a reasonably paranoid local firewall setup?
Device manufacturers, especially the cheap ones, tend to use cheap/quick/easy chipsets that often have Windows-targeted reference drivers, or they cobble their own. NOT all of these work at all well (I've had endless problems with cheap USB drives gagging a Win98 box 'cause their legacy drivers are crap.) But, the Windows monopoly has meant that there's immense Windows-centric inertia in low-end commodity peripherals.
This will slowly change as Linux gains desktop traction and Vista drives users toward The Penguin. It *will* happen, Linux support WILL improve, but it will take a while to become easily available. There are many forces pushing Linux adoption forward, it'll just be a while before it becomes embarrassing for a vendor to NOT provide Linux support.
"My strength is as the strength of ten men, for I am wired to the eyeballs on espresso."
I'm confused. The past three notebooks I've owned have all been immediately recognized as using WiFi cards with accompanying drivers.
Seriously, I think the article is trying to find a solution in the wrong area. If I want a laptop and I plan to use Linux (which I always do) then I plan to get a wifi card compatible with such. I have no idea how ndiswrapper works and have no plans to ever use it.
My most recent notebook - an HP/Compaq nw9440 - came with the option of a Broadcom or an Intel wireless card. I went with Intel for the simple fact that I know intel works.
Sure enough, wireless was up and running as soon as I installed SUSE 10.2 on the machine. (It initially came with Vista but I upgraded pretty quickly.)
The answer to WiFi is to ensure the manufacturers supply drivers - open source or not - to their chipsets, since they're no longer putting them in the firmware. Intel does. I believe Broadcom is now. Anybody else?
End of story.
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Seriously, they make most of their business with Linux (about 99% of the wireless access points out there are linux based and have a broadcom chipset), but they only ship binary drivers for their embedded platform.
It's the worst kind of company, since they don't support Linux but only suck the blood out of it.
Sometimes they also strip the copyright notice from the software they ship in their reference design (like, in my router there's an acme.com http server with no acknowledgment of the authorship)
That's the "solution": buy a new laptop with a newer WiFi chip in it? Did I miss something. I'll be the first to admit, that WiFi is very difficult to set up in most Linux distros is you don't have the right chip (A lot of Broadcom chips are a bear to set up with NDIS Wrapper, although I have done so successfully every time. It's not for the beginning user), but I think that telling someone to buy a new laptop is an even bigger turn-off. It's basically the capitalist equivalent of RTFM. Frankly, I think WiFi for ALL platforms including Linux would be better off if the WiFi card was virtualized by the system BIOS or firmware as a standard generic wired NIC like the Novell PCI 2000 NIC. The SSID and key settings could be stuck in the BIOS (with a user space application in the OS that has access to change those settings after a boot). That way, networking-wise the OS never has to deal with a WiFi device.
There is no benefit to tying the radio portion of the WiFi to the network portion of it at the OS level. In fact, it creates a LOT of needless confusion. Here's how it would work if it were done right:
1. The Radio portion of the WiFi would be in the BIOS (all settings like ESSID, WEP keys, AP mac addresses, etc...)
2. There would be an application to manage the radio portion of the WiFi chip at the OS level, but there would be no "driver" per say. Just read/write access to the "registers" in BIOS space that store the settings. This would allow the settings to be changed on the fly manually, or... automatically if desired. The manner of changing the settings would merely be a software problem at that point.
3. The IP portion of the WiFi chip would then be presented as an NE2000 PCI NIC (10/100) or some other fairly common and cross-platform supported hardware. Or maybe a totally new, NIC specifically used to present ONLY the IP portion of WiFi to the OS. (ie. the "NIC driver" wouldn't deal with ANY of the radio functionality. It would strictly involve IP only)
This would present much more functionality right off the bat. It would be possible to have promiscuous mode on any WiFi card, since that would be a problem residing in the IP driver domain. At that point, virtual machines that fake MAC addresses, or sniffing traffic over a WiFi device become a LOT simpler. But, this will never happen since it would break with the already established (and needlessly complex) systems in place already. Not to mention, it's not a problem to the average user if they're using the very easy, but substandard WiFi software for a certain commonplace OS...
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
It's not hardware vendors, it's chipset vendors. They remove logic and offload it to a doze driver. People not using doze lose, unless they get an external unit.
So, which cards are these? Is there a single easy to parse page with the actual names and brands of cards that most likely will work with linux? Is there a company out there that just does that, provide linux friendly wifi stuff, so there is less hoop jumping and google wandering about?
I thought that this was going to be the thing that saved wireless on Linux. Instead of needing kernel support, along with deep knowledge and source code in order to build a loadable module, all you need to know is the wlan_ng API, and compile your driver for that. Much simpler and cleaner. And you would then need only the same API for all of your discovery tools, GUIs, etc. But except for a couple of handheld Linuxes, I haven't seen it deployed much. Anything would be easier than the cranky PCMCIA and hotplug frameworks.
When companies release specs, the community writes drivers. Those drivers are included with the kernel, compiled as modules by distributions, and everything just works. When a company doesn't release specs, we can't do that. It really is the companies fault. Vote with your wallet, don't buy hardware without open source drivers.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
http://linux-wless.passys.nl/. Just search the complete listing and look for the Atheros chipset.
You're probably just trolling, but for the record Ubuntu's hardware detection is great. On my laptop wireless, audio, accelerated graphics, mouse, media keys and screen were detected and set up totally automatically. It's a much more seamless install than any version of Windows I've installed (I haven't installed Vista). The last time I'd used any kind of GUI with Linux was more than five years ago - it's come a very long way.
In fact, I've been waiting for the moment when I have to drop down to the CLI to fix something, and it hasn't come yet. It's been a couple of months now. I have access in two clicks to a whole repository of free, useful software, and there's no (non-DRMed) file format I haven't been able to open. It's really a very good operating system.
That's right. I was expecting to read about how somebody solved the problem. But they're just blithering about it. No useful content here, move along.
For those laptops that do not have integrated wireless, you might do some shopping around and discover which vendors support linux the best.
Personally, I got a 3-Com xjack card for that very reason. I plugged it in, my linux distro found it, and I'm on the internet. All of this was accomplished without the NDIS Wrapper.
This was a major pain for me as well.
I had read that WiFi has "solved" in the latest release of Ubuntu and have long been wireless in my home network, even for the desktop machines.
After trying all the non-NDISWRAPPER options, I finally used that tool and was able to get WiFi up and running, but even with that, it fails to initialize properly about half the time and I have to manually restart networking.
Combined with not having support for the latest NVIDIA drivers available through the package manager and having to recompile the drivers after a kernel security patch, this would have been an utter failure if I was new to this. NVIDIA is partially to blame as well, since they could well make their drivers have a safe mode that will work with cards released after the drivers, but the 8X series of cards has been out for how long and the driver still isn't in the package manager?
The lack of fail-safe mode in X after all these years is just insane. Fortunately, we shouldn't have to wait too much longer for that to be a mainstream patch.
That's generally the solution to the wireless problem in linux. Get a notebook with an intel based wireless card built in. And if you don't want to fool around with graphics drivers for 3d acceleration, do the same - buy a laptop with integrated intel graphics.
It's kind of amazing how Linux can't even auto-detect and auto-config hardware as well as Windows 95 could. Do you guys need another decade or two to figure it out? Rather than whining about how Microsoft is oppressing you, what about doing a little bit of work on this issue? Anyone think that might help? Oh really? Can you tell me why you install all those freaking motherboard, chipset, lancard, wifi, Webcam, etc, etc Drivers on your Windows machine?
"When a company doesn't release specs, we can't do that."
Sure, you can. It's just harder. If people have time to spend on worthless hacking like making an XBox run Linux, they should have the time to do something useful like reverse engineering these WiFi chipsets.
...allow some choice of which network card they come with, as well as allowing you to replace them fairly easily. The Dells even let you replace the video...so if you learned the hard way about ATI and linux, you can put an nvidia card in.
because they use the host CPU to do a lot of the work, requiring that the *driver* do "intelligent stuff". And, because they don't know jack shit about the value of what they are doing, they refuse to give away their "valueable IP" by opening up the driver. Probably in some cases because the only difference between their vanilla card and their top-of-the-line card is that the driver exposes more functionality.
Oh, and for MBCook, I could download the japanese driver and violate US FCC rules. I could use the US driver and travel to the EU and break EU regulations. Somehow, this doesn't seem to be getting the wireless manufacturers into trouble. That line is a load of shite.
"Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.
It's been 21 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment"
Whatever you think about limited government, this really is one area where we do need a bit of government intervention.
Once upon a time, when you bought the manual for a printer, it detailed all the escape codes for stuff like double width, bold, graphics &c. When you bought the manual for a modem, it had the AT command set and the RS232 pinout. It's only recently that hardware manufacturers have got into the habit of not releasing specifications. They rationalise this as "not wanting to give out information that could help their competitors" (as though their competitors aren't already reverse-engineering the f**k out of their products), but there are definite cases where false claims have been hidden behind such secrecy -- digital cameras with artificially-inflated pixel counts (which would be obvious from the RAW format, hence why it is so shrouded in secrecy) and graphics cards with only software differentiation between cheaper and more expensive models.
If it was law that the manufacturer of a piece of hardware must release specifications such that a competent person might write a driver enabling the use of that hardware on pain of being banned from selling it, then they would have to comply. Otherwise, the Windows monopoly will continue.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Funnily enough, I don't have any problems with WiFi, either. I use WPA-Enterprise and Fedora 7. Works great.
Used to work under Windows XP, too. Then it decided to stop working. Damned if I can get it going again.
Fucked if I can be bothered.
I never seem to have problems with wireless in Linux, either it just works or I use Ndiswapper.
On the other hand I have had nothing but trouble with Microsoft windows. Problems range from Microsoft windows saying my WPA password is the wrong length, random disconnects, to having to repair the connection at every boot. To much hassle for me.
Star Trek, there maybe hope.
Sounds like a few of you have had a lot of problems. I logged onto irc.oftc.net went into #debian and I had help->steps to implement->solved issue in about under 30 mins (ty gsimmons). I don't think my pci card was anything special just whatever linksys made at the time. (go ahead mark me as a troll)
My laptop came with a Broadcom 4318 chipset. The support for it is flacky and it only seems to work properly using ndiswrapper. Some days ago I decided I was going to try to buy a USB wifi device that was compatible with Linux. If possible, its drivers had to be already part of the vanilla kernel. To my surprise, those devices exist! They are the ones that have the ZyDas zd1211(b) chipset (the "b" one is better). I thought it was going to be hard to find one of those specific devices, but no. They are present in a wide range of USB wifi devices. I went to the two main malls in my country they had one of those devices each. Piece of cake. Furthermore, a USB dongle can be used in future computers very easily, and don't take power unless they're plugged in.
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/zd1211rw/devices
You only need the device, a vanilla kernel and firmware, which can be downloaded from SourceForge.net, and it's also probably available for your distribution as an official package.
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=129083&package_id=187875
So it's "free" as in "you have to buy new hardware?" Even when the built-in adapter "just works" in Windows?
If "just works" means mostly does not work, yes. The fact is that Wireless is just as big or bigger a pain in the ass for Windows users and they have other larger problems too.
The easy way to deal with this problem is to bring a live CD to the store. If the laptop does not work, don't buy it. Be sure to try things like power management. Any modern distribution will use kde's new interface and the laptop should sleep and hibernate on demand. If it does work, you know the thing will work well for the life of the hardware which is more than you can say for any version of Windows.
The only time you want to go looking for wireless cards is when you get hardware second hand or at a substantial discount. Even then it's a good idea to take the laptop to the store and try out cards until one works. Makers will often swap chipsets out so the only way to really know a card works is to see it.
I have a broadcom 4318 on an acer aspire 5002 and I have tried every linux distro that is currently out there (every main one anyways) and I have given up...I have Feisty installed on a partition on my laptop with grub but it hasnt been booted in months, because my xp just boots up and works and thats the way i like it...
I know my broadcom wireless sucks but if everyone has it, make some drivers for it!
Since i have a Medion Mim with some proprietry medion chipset, i'm stuck with no wireless for ubuntu.. :(
the driver doesnt work with NDIS wrapper either...
of course...
that doesn't stop me using debian stable on my desktop!
It's not pretty, but I found a solution which even works with old Windows 95 (for testing) and enables full WBA encryption. It works on any OS that can use the wired NIC in a machine. Are you ready...
Use an access point which is capable of Client Mode operation. I use a D-Link AP in client mode. I configure it with my browser. It requires no software install of any kind. Testing was done on the D-link AP and now a Linksys 54G router has been added to my travel pack because it cost less (lucky find, a version 4 for $12 at Goodwill).
I have been running wireless with an AP in client mode since Breezy Badger. Upgrading the firmware to DD-WRT has added the client mode. As a bonus, you get to use high gain antennas with much better range than a stock laptop provides, and the power is adjustable for use in poor signal locations. The router does the site survey for you internally, so you don't even need to know the SSID ahead of time. It is as simple as switching to either client or client bridge mode, scanning, choosing an AP, and picking the encryption and entering the key. After that it's net, nothing but net.
There are hardware solutions out there. The package may be a little big and bulky and not run on self contained batteries, but it provides excellent connections in hotels in marginal reception areas. With the external box, it can be positioned in a window where the neighbors open AP may provide better bandwidth than the hotel provides. I went to a Starbucks once not knowing the wireless wasn't free (T-mobile). I was able to find 2 unsecured APs from inside Starbucks to use instead. Nobody at Starbucks was the wiser. It beats getting busted for sitting in a car leaching on some residential street.
The truth shall set you free!
> The Iphone regularly updates e-mail, even while it's off,
How? By magic? I can understand that some server is doing that on behalf of an Iphone. But if the Iphone is off, how can it do anything - much less know that it is abroad?
If the only factor you have in purchasing hardware for your business is the initial capital outlay ($50), then you are missing about 80% of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for your IT expenses. Perhaps you are a VERY small business and your three laptops sharing a Linksys wireless gateway to the cable modem are all you need. Good for you! If your business ever grows, keep in mind things like administrative loading (the cost of the time for administrators to keep the servers and desktops running) and cost of failure (the productive time lost while all the PC's are being wiped and reloaded after a virus infestation). Hardware is cheap. People to run it cost money.
It always works (I use Windows XP), so I can get away with buying $50 PC's from the thrift shop. I know the reasons are complicated, but the fact is that buying special name-brand hardware takes both time and money.
--
My friend, you just hit the main reason I have an Ubuntu laptop. I had an older IBM Thinkpad. It was running Windows 2000. It got to the point when I would go to a meeting and someone wanted to give me a copy of their report or presentation, I could not read their thumbdrive. It was most often the case of Windows is serching for drivers for the new hardware. To make matters worse, there was rarely wireless internet on location. That got old fast.
Here is the situation. A hundred bucks for XP and a few hundred more for newer versions of Office so I can open the new documents and Power Point slides, and a subscription to another year of a major AV company, or load Ubuntu and just spend $30 for a compatible wireless NIC. It was a simple decision. I've never looked back. For use in meetings and such, I'm now an avid advocate for the Open Document Format. I haven't found a thumb drive needing a driver in forever. With the money saved, I bought an LCD monitor.
The truth shall set you free!
I installed Ubuntu on a computer I found at the local landfill, thrilled that it had a wireless card until discovering that ndiswrapper would be necessary to get it online. (No ethernet card.) It took hours to find all the necessary ingredients and instructions. They're all in different places. Why can't they be in just one place, with scripts to install everything automatically? Even if there are hundreds of cards, requiring more-than-hundreds of install packages, it would save millions of hours of frustration for linux newbies.
Ndiswrapper works very well, once it's set up. Kudos to the team for their efforts.
Unfortunately though, the WinModems were never as serious a problem as the current crop of Wifi cards are (and the upcoming driver-based Ethernet cards may be, if some of the predictions I've read come true). With modems, you could always go out and buy an external, serial-interface unit. They weren't hard to find, and every retard at a big-box computer store understood what you were talking about when you asked for an "external modem."
You only ran into trouble with modems if you started getting internal, PCI card ones. (Okay, and there was that weird Apple external thing, the Geoport. But to their great credit, they never called it a modem.) With Wifi cards, you can be just as screwed regardless of what kind of card -- PCI, PCMCIA, USB -- you choose. Even if you try to buy a particular model, you can still get something that doesn't work because the manufacturer has changed the hardware without any indication on the box.
About the only 'guaranteed' way to get wireless working on a Linux machine is to eschew traditional interface cards and go for something that's an Ethernet-to-Wifi bridge instead (usually called 'game adapters'). Like external modems, these use a standard, well-documented interface for both data and control. But they're expensive and I predict that as more game consoles ship with integrated wireless, they're going to be increasingly hard to find.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
WiFi is an expression of exactly the opposite. Microwave signals are a bad idea for a number of reasons.
--Here's a neat item worth considering. . .
The Neurophone, (look it up), demonstrated that one could transmit messages via electrical impulse through the skin and have those messages understood by the subconscious. When the subject being programmed is in a dissociative state, (you are in a dissociative state when you watch TV or play a video game), it was demonstrated that one could send instructions to the subconscious through the skin and thereby implant hypnotic suggestions. Subjects would follow these suggestions, believing them to be their own thoughts and ideas. They'd never heard the instructions given to them verbally. They had received them by direct electrical impulse. This isn't science fiction.
Okay. So cellphones, when outputting a 10 htz modulated signal, can directly buzz the brain with much the same effect. What a great system for delivering instructions!
Mind control is frighteningly easy. Heck, the Russians figured out how to beam voices directly into a person's head using EM back in the sixties.
WiFi in my house and on all the time? Um. . , gee, no thanks. There's enough garbage signal floating around my town as it is without beaming my own personalized source through my own home 24/7.
Now people will argue with this up and down. Fair enough. They can make their own decisions and refuse to acknowledge the information available. They don't want to be laughed at. But the cool thing is that Linux, for a number of reasons, is incompatible with this mode of social control. --You have to really really want it to microwave your head before it will comply. Now don't you think that's interesting? I sure do!
If you refuse to follow the leader and refuse to install your very own mind-control device in your home, then, well by gum, you don't even need a tin-foil hat. Bonus!
How sure are you that the impulses which guide you to follow self-destructive, limiting patterns at key moments of your life are really coming from within yourself?
The Matrix has you. Have a nice day!
-FL
"get more wireless vendors on board with the Linux movement"
That just about says it all...in the next paragraph he gives very good advice...use a wireless card based on the Atheros chipset...add madwifi drivers...done.
I have a laptop with a built in broadcom that would not work with ndiswrapper...I have learned that these laptops have a "hardware switch" to turn it on or off which is not supported in linux...For my Acer there was a project in development but I never got it to work.
Since we linux users have some spare cash (not buying windows)I bought a Atheros based DLink AirExtreme G650 which worked great with my laptop.
Time to stop crying about it and deal with it....yes, that means if you want to run linux look at what hardware is supported...also reading up on the subject would help.
It is fine to complain about hardware that is not supported...but keep in mind it is not a level playing field when one side has all the tools made just for them.
Linux developers are working on it but it takes time when hardware companies will not give allow developers full access to information. Linux has come a long way despite the roadblocks and it is a secure and stable OS, unlike the great MS.
I have also had problems with 5.1 surround sound. This weekend I spent a few hours working with nforce and sound blaster on Ubuntu and never got it working. I also don't see how it is anyone but the company's fault, unless you fault the distros and user for not pressuring vendors to provide more support. Perhaps a company should take a second step and move towards an Apple like strategy of having strict control over the hardware environment.
The rt2x00 chipset is also one of the better (and recent, i.e. >11MBps) ones. www.edimax.com.tw has some cards with said chipset.
Atheros is definitely one of the better supported cards.
However, I am surprised that no one has mentioned Ralink yet. They are perhaps one of the most friendly wireless chipset manufacturers to the Linux and open source community. They provide documentation without requiring a non-disclosure agreement. They also distribute an open source Linux driver which has been improved greatly by the rt2x00 project. The rt2x00 project is currently rewriting the Ralink drivers for inclusion in the kernel.
The legacy drivers from the rt2x00 do work well (at least the rt2500 that I have does) and are usually easy to install and configure. The binary firmwares for the drivers that require them are also freely redistributable.
Yep, I gave up also.
/Vista / Etch
I recently got a Dell laptop w Intel AGN 4965 wireless.
Triple boot XP
Wireless card absolutely awesome under Windoze
Gave up on NISWrapper, but I see they updated the driver info
on the Intel site.
Maybe I will try again.
This site is an example of why SQL Injection IS prevalent.
But of course when one uses their email as the pass it doesn't really make a difference, does it?
Wireless on windows isn't exactly flawless either. Sometimes you get windows wanting to control it over the manufacturers software and it doesn't work. Until SP-2 on XP doing 128bit WEP was a hit or miss proposition. And being a systems admin, I've seen a lot of people who are unable to connect to a wireless network using windows. I end up doing it for them. Also, windows can for some reason forget a network profile that it has previously had no problems with. OS X seems to be better at it but it too can suffer from dumb user syndrome. You also have a problem with windows blocking its own connections. And then there is the 3rd party pre-requisite anti-virus / network security suites that block outgoing traffic and want to examine every packet and then ask you if you want to allow. And last but not least. When you buy network cards sometimes they conflict with other chipsets. I have had cards that conflicted with the sound system. Easily fixed by changing settings in device manager but windows will change everything back to the setting that doesn't work next reboot.
Neuro-subconcious-what?
You are talking utter, utter, shit.
You are talking utter, utter, shit.
Actually, I wish I was. Seriously. Take ten minutes out of your busy day to look it up. Or don't. Your level of awareness is your problem and nobody else's. But ugly realities can't be changed through ridicule or denial. That just serves to paint a big juicy target on one's bottom while their head is snug in the sand.
-FL
Using the OpenHAL is a good way to watch your favorite linux (or openbsd) distro get whacked with a lawsuit.
I agree; I installed ubuntu on my aforementioned laptop prior to ending up with fedora 7. Ubuntu auto detected everything on the laptop appropriately, even the usual problem ones; sound, wifi, card reader. I was pleasantly surprised by ubuntu's hardware detection. I just really really didn't like having to sudo everything, otherwise I'd probably be using it. It even prompted me to get and install the binary radeon drivers, which was shocking.
I am 99% tinfoil wrap. Beat that! ::Bzzzzzzzzzt::
My laptop purchase algorithm automatically filters out laptops without an Intel wifi adapter (and Intel graphics, but that's another story).
Intel has a solid track record on Linux driver development done right, going back years. They just Get It, while most others don't. My current Thinkpad with a 3945 has worked, with WPA, networkmanager et al with virtually zero problems as soon as Kubuntu was installed.
Atheros' recent AR6K family may become an option in the not distant future, as they finally remove the need for the magic HAL in-kernel blob. However, given my many problems with AR5K-based adapters and Madwifi (kernel crashes galore, lack of in-official-tree drivers), I'm sticking with Intel unless they mess up.
I agree it is the companies 'fault'. But as a business, it has to be worth their time developing and maintaining the *nix wireless drivers. I believe with Dell and now HP coming on board the Linux bandwagon, card manufacturers will sit up and smell the opportunity, and we should start to see more commercial drivers available.
I just bought a laptop with an Intel motherboard and built in wireless. Worked flawlessly out of the box with Ubuntu Gutsy Gibbon with WPA. There's a reason Dell ships with Intel chips. I'd rather support a smaller company, but I have to balance that with my need to have a working (secure) internet connection.
IIRC, I believe the problem is with Broadcom, not the development community. They cant create drivers if the chipset manuf. wont release the info they need to do it.
Your assumptions are intriguing.... Do you have a pill for them?
The Neurophone, (look it up), demonstrated that one could transmit messages via electrical impulse through the skin and have those messages understood by the subconscious. When the subject being programmed is in a dissociative state, (you are in a dissociative state when you watch TV or play a video game), it was demonstrated that one could send instructions to the subconscious through the skin and thereby implant hypnotic suggestions. Subjects would follow these suggestions, believing them to be their own thoughts and ideas. They'd never heard the instructions given to them verbally. They had received them by direct electrical impulse. This isn't science fiction.
The subject in question needs to have been hypnotized before hand and given a series of instructions as to how to interpret the signals which are to be received through electrical impulse. --Sort of like teaching Morse code. When the suitable level of conditioning has been achieved, the subject is brought back into awareness and set into the wild, so to speak. After this point, messages can be delivered to that subject through the skin using the electrical impulses. Apparently, it can be done very rapidly. The subconscious is quite able to understand a quickly changing signal. Then a story can be told; "Bob heads out to the library and takes out a copy of Catcher in the Rye and then buys a bag of turnips and goes home again." Apparently, Bob would go ahead and do exactly this, thinking it was his own idea to perform those actions.
Just wanted to clarify things.
Interestingly, even without hypnotic conditioning, it is entirely possible to alter a target person's emotional state through different types of EM exposure. This in combination with television viewing, (TV's and that hypnotic flicker rate put people under very quickly), opens up a variety of possibilities. There was one item in relation to all of this which I didn't grasp the significance of immediately; the sudden and wide-ranging adoption of the new CFL light bulbs. I thought it was pretty obvious what the intent behind those was; installing everybody's living space with fluorescent lighting creates living environments which are constantly flickering at 120 cycles per second. Uck. --But then the bulbs evolved so that rather than using magnetic ballasts they employed an electronic ballast which served to raise the frequency from one or two hundred cycles per second up into the high thousands, which in combination with the fluorescing coating inside the bulbs appeared to remove any danger of the brain being affected by light flicker. "Hm," I thought, and wondered if perhaps I was just being needlessly paranoid.
Then I ran across an article which talked about the high level of EM radio frequency being emitted from the new bulbs, and another thought struck me. --Until now, incandescent light fixtures were never a noted source of radio frequency EM pollution, but now with this latest generation of CFL's. . .
It's very hard to find stats on what the exact frequencies are which are emitted, or how powerful they are, but I do find it curious that further EM pollution in the radio spectrum should be the result of adopting this new lighting solution. When you know the frequency range, we actually do have enough data in the public realm to work out how it affects the central nervous system.
-FL
How this managed to get onto slashdot is beyond me.
The problem is, wireless cards these days typically require two things to be reverse engineered -- the firmware (which is often not supplied in ROM, but as a binary blob that gets loaded by the driver during device init), and the driver itself (the thing that communicates between the OS kernel and the device). There are many problems with this.
First, the firmware is instructions for a custom microcontroller or DSP. This stuff is almost never documented. Imagine reverse engineering the instruction set for a CPU you've never seen before (orders of magnitude more difficult than many other types of reverse engineering projects). Most WiFi driver hackers in the BSD and Linux worlds either won't or can't reverse engineer this stuff (more on that in a second), so they either rely on getting the binary blob from the manufacturer of the chipset (as the madwifi folks do), or they extract it from the Windows drivers for the WiFi device.
Once you've got the firmware out of the way, then you have to reverse engineer the protocol to talk to the device at a slightly higher level. Somewhat easier, but still a daunting task, and there are few good tools right now to automate the process of discovering the protocol. Little is standardized, so you're pretty much starting from scratch every time. This is a far cry from getting Linux to run on an original Xbox, which was basically a bog-standard PC architecture (well known) with a few security tweaks in the BIOS.
Now, why wouldn't or couldn't you reverse engineer the firmware? Well, although reverse engineering itself is sacrosanct in the United States (totally legal for the purposes of compatibility), it is not in many other countries. Even if that were not an issue, the FCC in the United States (and other regulatory bodies in Europe and Japan that serve similar roles) regulates the dissemination of information about how to program devices that transmit over regulated radio frequencies, because they're afraid that you might use unauthorized frequencies or set the transmit power illegally high, for example. There are regs that prevent manufacturers from making their radios easy to tinker with to stomp on or snoop certain reserved frequencies (which is why it's difficult to find a scanner that can be easily modified to listen in on police frequencies). Not all WiFi channels are legal to use in all localities, which is why different countries have different firmware for the same chipset. So even if you actually manage to reverse engineer the firmware for a WiFi chipset, good luck being able to publish your findings. (If the chipset manufacturer doesn't sue you, pray you didn't screw up your custom firmware and broadcast on the wrong frequencies, or the FCC might take an interest in you... Hell, they might go after you anyway, even if you didn't screw anything up, just because you "documented the interface" so that someone else CAN use the hardware for nefarious purposes.) And that's a major problem for software you might want to release under an Open Source license such as BSD or GPL.
This is one of the reasons why the madwifi folks rely on Atheros to provide the firmware (the HAL), and why I recently had a major headache getting a laptop with one of the newer Atheros chips to play ball in Linux.
It may seem cheesy and a copout, but my solution to these problems have been to have a USB powered external Ethernet to Wireless bridge. Just configure it to connect to a list of set access points (or connect to whatever open one is handy). Works like a charm.
I've installed Ubuntu on a half a dozen very different machines - both old and new - and hardware detection has always been flawless. No problems with wireless either - not even the Broadcom chips. I either grab the firmware from Windows for the bcm43xx kernel driver, or use NDiswrapper (which I find gets me a better signal). I just installed Linux on a friends older Dell laptop, and lo and behold, not only was Fusion already running (flawlessly on an 8MB i810 - see Vista try that), I also got a popup telling me that the batteries life (not its charge) was low and needed replacing. I've never seen Windows do that. I also automatically detected when I plugged in an HP printer and just set it up for me instantly. To get this printer working under Windows I had to go and download 100MB driver "package" that installed all kinds of junk and took half an hour to install. When was the last time you actually tried to install a decent Linux distro? When Windows 95 was actually current?
Interesting you should put it that way. You're either a fool, or a troll - my vote is on the latter. The only thing I've had to install drivers for on two of the five systems I admin happens to be the NVidia 3D drivers. Everything else just worked, where I recall installing Windows 95 just to find I had 9 sound cards.
So yeah, Linux does a better job than Windows 95 could. Troll.
Your FLOSS ipw2200 driver relies on proprietary, non-auditable, possibly-evil, binary-blob firmware.
There are chipsets with FLOSS firmware - Prism FreeMAC for one: http://prism54.org/freemac.html
Welcome to Intel - land of non-free binary-blob firmware.
Pfft- Linux is a game, not an operating system.
I have a new laptop that came with Vista (HP Pavillion dv2210us), and no distro I tried supports my wireless internet with the exception of SimplyMEPIS. I've heard that SimplyMEPIS sets up ndiswrapper for you, but the point is it works. Why couldn't Ubuntu or any other distro do the same thing? The laptop uses broadcom, and it seems that quite a few other laptops use it as well. Wireless is becoming increasingly important as laptops gain more market share in computer sales, so why isn't anyone putting more time into that part of it. Of all the things that come on the installation disk for a Linux distro, wireless support should definately be there since the rest of the stuff can be downloaded after the install. I can't get on the interent to download wireless drivers if the wireless network is how I get my Internet access.
I'm not interested in commercial drivers. I'm interested in hardware documentation.
To me, selling a piece of hardware without (available) documentation is like selling DRM'd media: Through secrecy, the seller maintains an ability to effectively change, post-sale, a product which the buyer has already paid for in full. To add insult to injury, the seller deliberately deceives the buyer by concealing that fact from them.
I guess that's what passes for "business" nowadays, although they used to have a separate word for that kind of activity:
Racketeering.
Linux and FOSS in general are not a promise of a free lunch, you may get one, but nobody is offering that.
As for being aggravated for spending in hardware, add up how much it would cost you to have equivalent versions of all the software you use in Linux and soon you will realize that the few bucks you spend in a Wireless card pale in comparison with the spiraling costs of running a Windows machine.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Your choice.
If you use Linux you are buying into an ideology of how to ensure users are free to modify the software they are using. Don't like it? Don't use it, quite simple frankly, or use a distribution where you get a list of supported hardware and a provider with whom to whine, at least you would be paying for the privilege and would expect some service from your hard earned cash.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
How come a first post that's on topic and raises a legitimate issue be modded Flamebait? Oh wait. This is /.
They also provide good wireless Linux drivers and I know that the 3945 driver is included and automatically configured in Ubuntu. They also have an open-source driver in the works for the 3945 & that's included with Fedora, which feels nice to know that's one less binary blob that I have to deal with.
Hmm -- there's not some source you can go to to get this information? Especially in the case of wireless connectivity, I'd assume there would be some official public FCC source -- after all, all those magic waves going through the air just could be affecting our health...
It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
"...jumping through NDISWrapper hoops"
$ndiswrapper -i mydriver.inf
zOMG what a hoop!
It's easier to install the driver on Linux than Windows imho.
Also, if your built in card doesn't work with NDISWrapper or Linux at all, grab a USB solution and pop out the internal one.
I can't really comment on the legal issues since I haven't studied it, but I can comment on the technical ones. Much of the Atari 2600 hardware was undocumented and yet many different companies were able to reverse-engineer it.
Look, I know people say hard stuff is easy all the time, but it really is VERY FRIGGEN' easy to replace your internal wireless card in most laptops. We do it regularly at my work on our M class stuff when they get sick of PCMCIA cards or want G instead of B. The only ones that are a pain are IBM's which require a slight hack to accept a card different from the mfg. original Most of the time it is is as easy as popping off the cover, disconnecting 2 wires, removing the old card and installing and connecting the new one (Intel tends to work well). No soldering or special skills/tools required. It sure is hella cheaper than a new laptop (about $25 on eBay). On the Broadcom cards, most Linux's have a step by step walk-through you can complete to install and configure ndiswrapper and the driver within 15 minutes if you can ACTUALLY FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS. It is not rocket science, It just requires the ability to focus. Really, seriously. The wireless problems with Linux (I admit it should be easier) are no worse than the problems folks upgrading to Vista (better check that HCL!) are facing. It just requires a change in skill set.
well put sir
are you kidding? i'm highly skeptical of the neurophone. wikipedia's neurophone article redirects to the inventor, Patrick Flanagan who sounds like a crackpot. you're saying that our environmental EM noise is capable of transmitting thoughts to us? or that someone has the ability to control the EM to make us do things? the neurophone (even if it were possible) requires the subject to learn the EM language first, where are we learning this?
fear is the mind killer