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The OSS Solution to the Linux Wi-Fi Problem

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the wait-we-have-a-problem-with-that-now-too dept.

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."

35 of 204 comments (clear)

  1. Weird... by mdm-adph · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  2. Atheros by Brian+Lewis · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. What's the REAL Solution though? by eldavojohn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The OSS Solution to the Linux Wi-Fi Problem I'm confused, this article did not propose an OSS solution for the Wi-Fi problem at all. In fact, it just told me things I already know from first hand experience that I've posted about before.

    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.
    1. Re:What's the REAL Solution though? by jsupreston · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I don't understand why there isn't a "fallback" like we used to have on Ethernet NICs. For many years, it seemed like if you couldn't get a NIC to work, you could always use the old NE2000 drivers. You might not have all the functionality of the proprietary drivers, but it would at least get you on the network. Why can't we do the same with other hardware? Heck, we don't even have that fallback anymore with PCI NICs, so you're screwed if your setting up a machine with a NIC not recognized by the OS out of the box and you don't have drivers for it.

      --
      "It's a dog eat dog world out there, and I'm wearing Milk-Bone underwear."- Norm (from Cheers)
    2. Re:What's the REAL Solution though? by david.given · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      Because wireless hardware is really complicated.

      Typically a wireless card is a microcontroller with ROM, RAM, and a CPU --- usually an ARM. One end is plugged into the radio, of which there are a zillion different varieties. The other end is plugged into your computer.

      Some wireless cards don't have their software on ROM --- which means that in order to make it work, the first thing you have to do is to upload the software from your PC. This is the infamous 'binary blob' problem. That software is highly proprietry and really, really hard to write. So far (although I could be wrong) there are no open source firmware replacements.

      Even once you have the card programmed and running, you still need to talk to it. This usually involves a driver that needs to know how to talk to the wireless card's host hardware (the bit between the microcontroller and your computer), the firmware itself (which may have different command sets for different versions of the firmware), and sometimes you even need to know implementation details of the radio chipset. That's a lot of information you need access to, and it all interacts in rather horrible ways. (Also, FCC regulations may mean that the vendors aren't allowed to give you information that could be used to, say, make the card operate on unauthorised frequencies...)

      It also doesn't help that the Linux wireless layer isn't terribly well designed: the abstraction layers are in the wrong place, which means that in order to write a driver you have to duplicate a lot of code. That's one reason why the BSD operating systems typically have better wireless support. Their driver framework makes it a lot easier to write wireless drivers.

      The good cards usually have well-designed firmware on ROM with a sufficiently abstract interface that implementation details aren't exposed. They're easy to support, because the vendor can change the implementation without having to change the driver. The bad cards have firmware that's loaded at run time that exposes lots of implementation details that the vendor can't tell you about because the third party whose radio chipset they're using made them sign an NDA. (Or just because they don't want to. Broadcom fits this category.) They require lots of unpleasant reverse engineering.

      So, in short, wireless drivers are hard because wireless cards are really complicated.

    3. Re:What's the REAL Solution though? by grahamm · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Typically a wireless card is a microcontroller with ROM, RAM, and a CPU --- usually an ARM. As wireless cards are intelligent with their own processor it should have been relatively simple for a high level API to have been defined (in a similar way to VESA for display cards) by which all wireless cards communicate with the host computer.

    4. Re:What's the REAL Solution though? by WhiteWolf666 · · Score: 2, Insightful

      You would think so, no? Why not use TCP/IP?

      Frankly, its a shame that you can't get the equivalent of a PCI (or PCI-X) "wireless bridge". I would love a DD-WRT box that went into my system, and managed all aspects of my networking for me, addressable via some kind of internal IP address scheme.

      This would give you all sorts of cool abilities; control it via your browser or any sort of "internal" application (something like Apple's airport stuff).

      Hell, even given basic engineering skills this wouldn't take more than 3-4 chips, one for the "ethernet" card, one for the "bridge", one for RAM, and maybe one for ROM, if you didn't network "boot" the bridge.

      --
      WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
    5. Re:What's the REAL Solution though? by ncc74656 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      So, in short, wireless drivers are hard because wireless cards are really complicated.

      Here's an idea: on one card, combine a wired network controller (RTL8139 or whatever) with a wireless bridge. It'd be like plugging a bridge into the network jack, but everything's already in one place. Conceptually, it's not much different than the way internal modems used to be built: combine a serial interface and the guts of an external modem on one board. Just as the internal modem appeared to your computer as just another serial port (that happened to have a modem hanging off of it), this would appear to your computer as just another wired NIC (that happens to have a wireless bridge hanging off of it). Configuration can be done with a web interface.

      It'd cost a few bucks more for the wired network controller, but compatibility with Linux would be guaranteed.

      --
      20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
    6. Re:What's the REAL Solution though? by david.given · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Firmware is just firmware - it runs on a different CPU and only has access to the device. Binary blobs run in your kernel space and could (potentially) mess with anything on your system.

      Ah, but the firmware on the wireless card is running, effectively, at a higher privilege level than your kernel --- it can do things totally outside the kernel's control. Even if you are legally allowed to redistribute the image, how do you know what it's doing? Given that all your network traffic is passing through that thing, and that it's got complete unsupervised control over all the radio bandwidth it can eat, and that on some interfaces (such as PCI) they can even access host memory... there's a lot of scope for malicious behaviour. Without source, they can't be audited. That's what I mean by the binary blob problem.

      (The firmware source code probably includes lots of deeply patented and proprietry frequency-hopping and radio control software, which the FCC would be deeply unamused to have people play with; most likely there's also going to be a third-party embedded operating system, too, to make it all go. It would probably be a legal nightmare to release source.)

      (You're right in that there's not much difference between uploaded firmware and firmware in ROM --- it's just a variation of the same problem.)

    7. Re:What's the REAL Solution though? by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Or, to take a closer example, there should be something akin to the Bluetooth adapter USB device class. In fact, I don't understand why there isn't one.

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  4. Re:Scientist's viewpoint by Walpurgiss · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. Re:Scientist's viewpoint by mdm-adph · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've been using Linux from the early days, mostly for scientific computing. For that it is great. But the problem is that linux has so many driver complications, and users tend to blame it on the companies that make the devices, and things never go anywhere as a result. Well, the only driver problems I've ever had with Linux have been with ATI cards (which is ATI's fault) and the aforementioned wireless mess, and I still don't see how this isn't the fault of the companies. But, if I'm wrong, someone please enlighten me.
    --
    It is by my will alone my thoughts acquire motion; it is by the juice of the coffee bean that the thoughts acquire speed
  6. I agree by cjonslashdot · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:I agree by Zombie+Ryushu · · Score: 2, Insightful

      I'm an experienced Linux User, and you sound like someone I know.

      Editing files has nothing to do with it. Generally, Under Linux, Wifi falls in three catagories. Those that do work. Those that work with NDISwrapper, and those that don't work. Those that work with NDIS wrapper NDIS wrapper installs the drive for you. Those that work out of the box will simply work out of the box. Those that don't work will sit there and stare at you and do nothing. There is a minor special exception for the BCM 43xx, you have to install their firmware first using something called the bcm43xx-fwcutter. But most distroes automate this.

      So stop Trolling.

  7. Take the time to buy the right hardware... by Kludge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    a complete load of hot air when articles claim how easy it is to setup wireless Internet on Linux machines


    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.

    1. Re:Take the time to buy the right hardware... by Ginger+Unicorn · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I want an operating system, not a political movement.

      then support that operating system by buying hardware that it is allowed to interact with by the vendor. activism is also sometimes pragmatic you know.

      --
      (1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
    2. Re:Take the time to buy the right hardware... by Schraegstrichpunkt · · Score: 3, Informative

      I want an operating system, not a political movement.

      Richard Stallman didn't want a political movement either. He wanted to work around a flaky printer. Unfortunately, reality can be such that a political movement is necessary in order to obtain the things that many of us think should be able to be taken for granted.

      --
      http://outcampaign.org/
    3. Re:Take the time to buy the right hardware... by nmos · · Score: 2, Insightful

      What gets me is that the Linux community still believes, in 2007, that auto-detection of hardware isn't worth the effort.

      On what planet exactly? End user distros have been auto-detecting hardware for at least several years now. On average I'd even say that given a bare computer plus a Windows CD and a Ubuntu CD you're more likely to have everyting work on Ubuntu.

      And just recently, I bought an ASUS motherboard, and tried to install Slackware 12.0 on it. And you know what happened? The kernel hangs after reporting the serial driver message. Sure, I could trace through the code to find the likely culprit.....

      Or you could plug your Asus motherboard name/model into Google along with the words Linux and Slackware and probably have your answer in a few seconds. Better still, you could do this before buying the darn thing. If you buy from major online sites like Newegg you can search their user comments/reviews for the word Linux as well.

      But a large part of driver installation on Linux is a manual process; on my 2003 Toshiba laptop, I end up recompiling the kernel to get the sound to work.

      If you don't want to be recompiling kernels etc why on earth are you using Slackware? I can't get a standard size sheet of plywood into my wife's little Subaru hatchback either but that doesn't imply some sort of design deficiency in the Subuaru, it just wasn't designed for that.

      If you want an idea of how good the Linux hardware detection/support is just burn yourself a copy of Knoppix and try it out on a few machines.

  8. It's one of the three big weaknesses by petes_PoV · · Score: 2, Insightful
    WiFi, USB and Video

    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
  9. There's Still a Problem With Wireless? by filesiteguy · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    The Kai's Semi-Updated Website Thingy
    1. Re:There's Still a Problem With Wireless? by glop · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Replying to myself as I hit submit by mistake. Sorry.

      What I meant is that many people are in different situations. Many people who are not considering Linux this week might in couple of months.

      This means that many people will wake up some day, want to install Linux and realize that Linux can or cannot manage their hardware. They will react in different ways : fix the problem by using the ndiswrapper, installing other hardware, go back to Windows or OS X etc.

      So, buying the right hardware from the start is only an option for people like us who already know they want Linux. Of course it helps as it rewards the good hardware makes who are Linux friendly, but it does not solve the problem instantly.

      As TFA said, OEM might bring a big solution : DELL/HP wants to offer Linux laptop, so they choose compatible hardware. Then they want to use the same components across the line of products, so they ditch a few incompatible components.
      This brings benefits on two sides :
        - The hardware/chipset makers then realize they need to be selected for the Linux to avoid being excluded from markets bigger than the Linux market that have suddenly become tied to the Linux market
        - The people who bought the non-Linux computers, got Linux compatible hardware anyway which makes their potential switch easier.

      So, there are many big stories playing out here and I can understand why people would want to discuss them on Slashdot.

  10. Whatever happened to WLAN_NG? by ishmalius · · Score: 2

    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.

  11. Re:Atheros names/brands/sources would be nice by Roofus · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://linux-wless.passys.nl/. Just search the complete listing and look for the Atheros chipset.

  12. Major Pain by TargetBoy · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  13. Buy Intel by kilgortrout · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:Buy Intel by osho_gg · · Score: 2, Informative

      Mod parent up. Intel wi-fi chips drivers are open sourced and work reliably well. I have been using ipw2200 driver in my laptop for last 3 years and it has always worked well across multiple kernel versions. Osho

  14. Re:We need new laws by cdrguru · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Unfortunately, what you would like to mandate is at the same time a mandate for Chinese domination of the hardware market.

    Today the hardware is almost immaterial to a "hardware" product - it is the inner workings of the firmware, the driver and such that are where both the bulk of the engineering time and bulk of the "value" are. There are few, if any, secrets in silicon today.

    So a manufacturer puts a lot of effort into developing a new product in the US or EU. If the functionality of the hardware/firmware is then required to be disclosed it is trivial to make the same hardware product elsewhere and compete head-to-head without any real R&D cost. Sure the Linux community and a few hackers might be better off, but at what price?

    Today, the only effective way to compete against Chinese manufacture is to have the hardware, firmware and software talking behind the scenes. The firmware interface to the hardware isn't disclosed and the driver that talks to the firmware isn't disclosed. Absolutely, the hardware can be duplicated but without the firmware and driver the device requires an equivalent amount of development effort.

    Yes, that put the Chinese manufacturer on an equal footing with the US or EU manufacturer. Instead of how they would much prefer it where all the "hard" problems are solved in the US and they Chinese get to just make cheap knock-offs.

    Where was development for USB hubs done? Where are they made today? Compare this to video cards - how many 3D cards are distributed by Chinese manufacturers? Sure, they are all imported with "Made in China" stickers but they are made for US, EU and Canadian manufacturers that own the firmware and drivers.

  15. Buying a new laptop? No way! by rg3 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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

  16. Re:The all OS solution by Technician · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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!
  17. package it up by Darth+Cider · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  18. Way worse than Winmodems. by Kadin2048 · · Score: 2, Informative

    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."
  19. The thing I find interesting about all this. . . by Fantastic+Lad · · Score: 2, Funny
    Linux is the result of a lot of people who don't want to be slaves to somebody else's megalomaniacal vision. Linux is a concrete expression of freedom and self-direction and all the good things society can be. Sharing and openness and ingenuity, etc.

    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

  20. I Call BS! by Perl-Pusher · · Score: 2, Interesting

    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.

  21. Just use Intel by beeblebrox · · Score: 2, Informative

    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.

  22. Clarification. by Fantastic+Lad · · Score: 2, Informative
    Actually. . . I was just reviewing my own post here and realized that I'd described poorly the process by which the messages-through-skin thing worked.

    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