> You know, aside from the vi-emacs debate this is probably one of the > most common topics on uug - How to get xxx wireless card to work in > Linux. All of these cards work just fine under Windows but its a huge > pain to get them to work under Linux. Also, every card seems to have a > different set of hoops to jump through. Why can't this be better? Why > can't the process be the same for every card and just substitute in the > correct driver? Why does it have to require recompiling the kernel in > so many cases to get this to work? So many people are using wireless > pcmcia cards these days, you'd think it would be easier. > > In other words, since its so popular, why can't it be easier?
Wireless is one of my biggest complaints about Linux. Yesterday I got my internal wireless working on my new laptop. It wasn't too bad, but I did have to add a one line kernel patch. Luckily, wireless is getting better. It took me 3 days to get it working when I got my first card a while back (before it was really popular). The 2.6 kernel (from what I've read [1]) should have a more unified wireless subsystem/API. The problem with wireless is two fold (in my opinion): 1) 802.11 is still a pretty new technology. There are standards out there but vendors are much less likely to follow them. Every version of a card seems to have a different firmware, and people still can't agree on a lot of stuff (802.11g just got the final official stamp of approval from the standards body but vendors have been making cards for a while; they tend to just work with their APs). 2) Vendors won't release the specs to their cards. This happens for several reasons but I have to run work on a group project so I can list them here... I'll finish this later, or someone else if they want... :-) -Evan [1] http://www.kniggit.net/wwol26.html -- /********************************************************************\ Evan McNabb: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> http://evan.mcnabbs.org System Administrator, CS Department, BYU GnuPG Fingerprint: 53B5 EDCA 5543 A27A E0E1 2B2F 6776 8F9C 6A35 6EA5 \********************************************************************/
pgp00000.pgp
Description: PGP signature
____________________ BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ ___________________________________________________________________ List Info: http://uug.byu.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
