On Jan 2, 2009, Larry Finger <[email protected]> wrote: > Alexandre Oliva wrote:
>> Any news on this front? >> Thanks in advance. Looking forward to a positive response from you all. > I'm not sure what you want. You mentioned you were getting in touch with Realtek to get their input on this device. I was wondering how cooperative they were. Other than that, I'm trying to decide whether those bits can be considered Free Software (i.e., none of the 4 essential freedoms can be substantially denied), before I include it in Linux-libre. > We took the Realtek Linux driver and put the difference between that > driver and the RTL8187 device into the Linux driver. Right. That's why I'm following up with your upstream, to figure out how it got there, and whether we can get enough information to set it apart from 'black magic' and make it possible for a user to adapt it to suit her own needs. > That code was incorporated into kernel 2.6.27. The are ongoing > improvements, but the driver works very well. I've had trouble suspending one of my notebooks with an rtl8187b WiFi interface, but I haven't investigated whether that's a consequence of the removal of those bits. I know some people are working with Lemote to try to address this same problem on their 100% Free laptops. We'll see. Thanks, -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ You must be the change you wish to see in the world. -- Gandhi Be Free! -- http://FSFLA.org/ FSF Latin America board member Free Software Evangelist Red Hat Brazil Compiler Engineer _______________________________________________ linux-libre mailing list [email protected] http://www.fsfla.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/linux-libre
