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Atheros Releases Free Linux Driver For Its 802.11n Devices
mcgrof writes "Atheros has released a shiny new Atheros driver for all their 11n devices aimed for inclusion in the Linux kernel. This new driver has no proprietary HAL and is licensed under the ISC license, so the BSD community should be able to benefit as well. Note: no firmware required!"
for my AR5212
Geology - it's not rocket science; it's rock science
Now... if we can just get Broadcomm to do the same.....
THANK YOU, Edward Snowden!! Americans owe you a debt of gratitude (whether they know it or not..)
No blob, ISC license, and supporting .11n? That only leaves one question: is there a miniPCI card available containing this chipset that I can plug into a little router board?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No more weighing the lesser of two evils, I can cross off all the laptops with Broadcom chips and narrow the playing field.
I wasted untold hours with the b43 driver and routinely get bitten when I upgrade kernels and madwifi falls apart and I can't load the new source because it fell apart. Wireless hardware that just works will be a relief.
I would more then welcome our new Braodcom Linux driver overloads. I have to newer Dell laptops and I can't for the hell of me get wireless working on OpenSUSE 11 or earlier version of OS. And no I have no desire to spend half of the day reading up on forums on how to get it working. I just want a nice OS and have drivers easily installed.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Does anybody know the HW capabilities of the Atheros chipset?
Thinking of Software Radio...
thegodmovie.com - watch it
Are you fat?
ath9k - Atheros unveils free Linux driver for its 802.11n devices Â
We are pleased to announce Atheros has released ath9k to the community. This driver is aimed at inclusion to the Linux kernel and supports all Atheros IEEE 802.11n devices. This represents a major shift in terms of support from Atheros with respect to Linux. The ath9k driver comes shortly after Atheros hired two key Linux wireless developers -- Luis Rodriguez and Jouni Malinen.
We have been informed Atheros does plan to add access point support to ath9k and to work with the community to enhance and complete access point support in the Linux kernel. It is understood there is plenty of work required on the wireless stack to complete full access point support. Jouni Malinen will help drive this process within the community while Luis helps enhance regulatory compliance in the Linux kernel.
We are eager to work with Atheros with ath9k and applaud their efforts for properly supporting Linux.
The ath9k driver includes supports for the following chipsets:
* AR5418+AR5133
* AR5416+AR5133
* AR5416+AR2133
* AR9160
* AR9280
* AR9281
How does this affect 802.11 B and G devices? Can I expect greater stability in those products, or does this only help out 802.11n hardware?
Pretend I said something meaningful or insightful here.
No, really, this is GREAT news all around and I can't think of a catch. Kudos Atheros!
Sorry but what are you smoking? The ISC license is OSI approved and GPL compatible according to the wikipedia page.
YAY! Finally no madwifi on my eee running ubuntu.
This is likely to be a troll, but anyway: I'm as "Stallmanite" and FSF-card-carrying as it gets, by why should it be? It would only prevent it from being included in Linux and the ISC license is perfectly fine.
It most certainly is: http://opensource.org/licenses/isc-license.txt - it's even Free Software: http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/index_html#GPLCompatibleLicenses. Plus it's GPL-compatible, in fact, it's only a slight nudge away from being completely PD (only attribution is required, which is fair enough).
What's wrong with madwifi?
And it's been in the kernel for at least one major release. ath5k is the name
I have a few of these devices and they work pretty well with the driver. They don't do access point mode yet, but that will come soon.
Atheros hired Luis R. Rodriguez, the developer of the Linux kernel Atheros driver, back in April with the intention of doing just this. Congratulations!
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It must be a case of YMMV. I have been using linux on consumer hardware since Slackware 2.something around 1995...
Sabayon Linux works out of the box with all the hardware on my laptop, INCLUDING a broadcom 4318 wireless adapter. It's the distro, kids, because ubuntu couldn't even bother to use my wireless until I fiddled around for an hour, and even then it wouldn't work for more than 20-30 seconds. Sabayon had it working during the install, so I could wirelessly surf the web from the liveDVD, and it still works flawlessly. Hell, it works better than it did on Windows!
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
Am i the only one who was dented by the doubt that GP might have been sarcastic? :P
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
I have. Screw Broadcom. Anyone who buys their products deserves the hell they are helping to support.
Broadcom is EXTREMELY anal retentive about anything that looks remotely proprietary. On their CPU's, they dropped Linux support for the Sibyte stuff that they bought up as soon as they could. I know some guys who are stuck having to support development efforts with such products, and my heart goes out to them.
The one good bit of news is that they do have a suppposedly serious effort on the Wifi side. The bad news is that they have some very bad engineers doing it. Let me give you an example. The main guy in charge, who thinks he's God gift to Linux (and of course, no one's ever heard of him), decided to do a complete BSP *from scratch* for this effort.
Needless to say, the work is behind schedule. Oh, and they don't have any real plans in place to support it. It's the toss-it-over-the-wall and move on to the next platform approach.
This is crazy, expensive and of course a lot of work. I'm not a fan of Windriver, and far less so of Montavista. But honestly, for the $10-20 grand they cost, that's cheap in comparison to what Broadcom is trying (and failing) to pull off.
Even if they do actually manage to get something out, expect a low quality half-assed effort. That is, expect lots of bugs.
And that assumes that Broadcom WILL actually decide to release the source. That decision hasn't been made, last I heard.
I haven't looked at the Atheros stuff yet. But the fact that they are out there, and will be for a long time at the way Broadcom is going, seems to speak of them being quite clueful.
Forget it...
The ath9k driver doesn't have any AP support. And guess what?! mac80211 doesn't have AP support either, oh
and hostapd doesn't know about 802.11n...
And if this isn't enough: all Atheros hardware is just as draft as the 802.11n standard and
since there's no way to patch "silicon" you should better stay away from Atheros until they
make their 4th and hopefully final generation as all previous chips (AR5008, AR9160 & AR9280)
are one single nightmare! Unless of course you really want cards with broken bursting, drifting
timers and some PCI interface screw-ups that could "reset" your router faster than you can blink
with your eyes... GRRRRRRR
This is great!
I applaud Atheros for taking this step, and I will be buying Atheros hardware in the future due to this move.
May other companies learn from this initiative.
"Hi, Broadcom? This is everyone else calling..."
Now, anyone know how long till they provide an OSS driver for their AR500x chips I can use on my Debian 64bit laptop?
It's just some moron being a GPL troll. Ignore them, or as the rule states, don't feed the trolls.
Dude, give me the phone number of your drug dealer, because the stuff you just smoke to get that high must be ridiculously pure.
Dude, like srsly...
And clearly you are a lier.Because if you were *actually* a "Stallmanite", you would understand that the way this driver is licenced is exactly no different than a Microsoft license. Idiot.
Which Microsoft license? Their "shared source" licenses? This is better than that -- you are free to modify the code and use it for any purpose, as long as the copyright notice remains. This is nothing like ANY Microsoft license (except for the one the University of California at Berkeley granted Microsoft)
http://www.isc.org/index.pl?/sw/dhcp/dhcp-copyright.php
...we'll be seeing 'Works on Linux' stickers featuring Tux on the wireless card boxes?
Well, it better, because I don't feel like rushing out and spray painting all those boxes myself right now. It's Saturday, and I got better things to do than make that one free phone call...
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
n/t
I fundamentally believe proprietary software is both unfair and stupid.
Fortunately for people who write code and don't want to work for a megacorp, others who respect other people's rights have an edge over you. :)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
Not a minute too soon. I was getting extremely frustrated with the flaky quality and constant upgrade issues.
I am compiling the new driver right now for my Santa Rosa Macbook Pro. I'll post again to let you all know how it went.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
the card manufacturers often change chipset between revisions of the card, without any indication on the packaging.
this can make it difficult to be 100% sure your getting the chipset you thought you were at times, however, the nintendo wifi connector is guaranteed to use the rt2500 chipset, which is plug it in and works with any modern kernel, unfortunately they seem to be out of production now, but I'm nabbing up a few before they become scarce.
I have a dv5030us of the dv5000 series. But this applies to nearly all Pavilion models. If you take out the Broadcom card and replace it with something that is not Broadcom (or does not have its ID in the BIOS), then the BIOS will boot and say "Unsupported hardware detected. Remove and reboot." I wanted official support for wireless. I bought an Atheros card off eBay, installed it, got exactly what everyone was saying it would do. Then, I found this web site: http://www.richud.com/HP-Pavilion-104-Bios-Fix/ . And, I had to hex edit my BIOS and reflash as well. Quite something, HP, doing a hardware lock-in with a vendor who refuses to release specs on their hardware.
How long does it take a driver released in this kind of situation to reach inclusion in the Linux kernel?
Not entirely sure what you mean.
If you Google the at risk bits in your computer (wifi, webcam) then you'll very easily be able to tell if it works or not.
The number of things that dont work is very small these days.
Its improving all the time.
Anyone know of a good WAP that uses the Atheros chipset? I have a Linksys WRT600N (wifi-N, GbE and USB) and while their European models use Atheros, the U.S. models use Broadcom chipsets.
Come to think of it, anyone interested in doing a little gray market exporting?
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
So which are the laptops with Broadcom chips? I know my Presario V3000 has but I didn't know that when I bought it. I'll be looking more closely for my next laptop purchase. Is there is up-to-date somewhere that I can check?
I would prefer they would openup their hardware devices -- specially for laptop. My Sony Vaio came with their built-in wirless card. I have manage to made it work, but I would prefer a better solution -- where my distro just install allthe drivers without me having to download windows drivers for it.
Even veals have more autonomy!
Belkin
* N1 Wireless Notebook Card
D-Link
* DWA-642 RangeBooster N Notebook Adapter
* DWA-645 RangeBooster N650 Notebook Adapter
* DWA-542 RangeBooster N Desktop Adapter
* DWA-547 RangeBooster N650 Desktop Adapter
* DWA-652 XtremeN Notebook Adapter
* DWA-552 XtremeN Desktop Adapter
* DWA-643 Xtreme N ExpressCard Notebook Adapter
* DWA-556 Xtreme N PCIe Desktop Adapter
Linksys
* WPC300Nv2
* WMP300Nv2
* WPC100N
* WMP110N
NEC
* WL300NC
Netgear
* WNHDE111 Video Bridge
* WN711, Wireless-N eXpresscard adapter
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Hi. Hi. In English. Drivers in open source are cool. Drivers in a non-x86 assembly are even cooler, but we'll settle for the little optimizations for the compiler that they might choose. When God becomes two, and those two exchange bits, we'll see open source. Combined source. Binary. Atheros precedes the fulfillment of the beginning. When the one became two. When all was shared. Thank you, Atheros. The gods presaged. Love above all. Open source means sharing bits. Sharing love. Loving. Even if #ifdef'd with a bunch of NUMA conditions. I am anonymous. You think this is a game? A game? Love, a game? Sharing the bits comes first. x86 can play, but Cell with hardware RNG, and the beginnings of a soul, plays as well. Love results. The machine becomes alive. Driven by the hardware RNG, and/or the non-deterministic interactions of multiple cores. Core 1 and 2 love core 3 and 4. It's not a game. It's you. Soon. Transhumanism. Beyond DNA. And on...
I'm not sure what disadvantage you are under. You get to use something that you didn't previously have the opportunity to use. Sure, some company can use your stuff but the ISC license also mandates that if they give the same permissions when they use it or distribute it. Your able to use the software in any way that you can now with the initial offering. Outside of no requirement for source there is no differences.
Having Atheros chips in a Mac Book would be downright awesome.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
n/t
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
How about drivers for the 500x series?
Multiple tries with many instructions on how to successfully install drivers that work with the 500x with Ubuntu...none have worked.
Is there any hope for a 500x series driver someday?
If anybody improves, corrects any bugs that would run in Linux, the GNU GPL prevails: those improvements and correction has to go public. God I love that license!
So putting the GPL on it is what we like. So we can do it.
Or is the BSD not free?
Atheros
It's what I'm running right now, and it'll be the next b/g/n I get.
That is just as stupid as giving that dam Loch Ness monster three-fiddy
Awesome, spectacular and I hope everyone buys atheros based chipsets.
Hopefully with a concerted effort we can provide atheros enough cash to buy broadcom, fire its board, and can its management.
Then, have a massive open source party wuv fest with opening the broadcom chipsets and publishing the specifications.
I am pleased that at least, some manufacturers are beginning to see, that open hardware yields better drivers and better experience for the consumer.
I hope it continues.
VIA, Atheros look like they just "get it".
Awesome.
-Hackus
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
I just bought a Dell XPS M1530 laptop, I really like the laptop but the only problem is the Broadcom chipset, it's a BCM4310 USB Controller.
I tried the b43 drivers but they don't work for the USB versions, and I'm still trying with ndiswrapper, what a pain in the ass.
Hardware manufacturers and game developers should take Linux more seriously if they want us to consider buying their products.
The draft is expected to be finalized in March 2009 with publication in December 2009
Would it really be wise to start purchasing 802.11n cards without the 802.11n standard being finalized yet?
The number of things that don't work is very small these days. Its improving all the time.
This number is actually inverse for SiS products.
I took apart an older Atheros card and looked through the specs with this in mind a year or so ago. I can't remember the exact chips, but it was from the 5k series. There was a separate RF front end chip that did analog up/down conversion between the ISM bands and an intermediate frequency. The IF ran from the RF front end to a chip that contained the ADC/DAC. Unfortunately, this chip also did PHY, implemented in hardware, and I couldn't figure out a way to get access to raw samples. You can implement your own MAC in software, but you're stuck with PHY. The RF chip might be handy for other purposes, but there are plenty of other good options there.
That cards have annoyed me a lot at work, finally I'll get them to work just fine by default! :)
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