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77 Comments
- ArchonMagnus, on 10/12/2007, -0/+29This will be great. Not having adequate drivers for (typically closed source) modern hardware tends to drive off both home and enterprise Linux users. This is an excellent thing IMO. Hopefully more to come.
Just my 2KB. - koweja, on 10/12/2007, -0/+16Damn straight. I only have a wireless connection, so if I can't get online it's generally a real disadvantage. And, if I want to do a net install of Debian, it's more than just a disadvantage.
- hungarianhc, on 10/12/2007, -1/+13This will be great... Linux really needs better 802.11 support.
- atdigg, on 10/12/2007, -1/+12Actually Linux is much easier to install than Windows (and faster). Maybe I am lucky but on my 2 computers I install Linux in 12-15 minutes and everything works. If I install Windows it takes me lots of time and many reboots and I have to hunt for drivers on the Internet.
- Misos, on 10/12/2007, -1/+10You call the operating system that is used on more web servers than any other "an elaborate toy?" Linux is not as easy to install as XP in some ways, but in many scenarios it is definetly faster, and less expensive.
The problem with Linux, as I've said before, is that only recently have distro developers started targetting the average user. Prior to that it was intended for people looking for a viable alternative to UNIX, and then server admins. - epohs, on 10/12/2007, -0/+8Getting my LinkSys WMP54GS WiFi card to work with Gentoo was one of the worst computer experiences I've had in years. I actually abandoned Gentoo because of this difficulty and moved to Ubuntu, which was easier, but only marginally easier, and was made easier only because I stumbled upon a very gracious person in the ubuntu IRC channel.
I guess the point of my story is that getting WiFi to work in Linux was exponentially more difficult than I expected. And, I imagine it affects a lot of people's decision to use Linux. This is great news. - 7of7, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7This is awesome. I'll be happy if I can get this into my Dapper install. I have tons of problems with wireless, though I thought that the Intel 2915 was well supported already.
- Tsuroerusu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7@SpasticThinker -
"The casual user looking to try linux is not going to want to buy new wireless hardware just to try it out. I can understand that thinking - if your laptop comes with a wireless card, why buy another?"
Well, if you want to run Linux and your wireless card is the only thing that prevents you from switching, that might be a compelling reason to invest 30 bucks or whatever and get something that works, and by the way it's a hell of a lot cheaper to buy a wireless card that works under Linux than buying a Mac.
"Furthermore, if you have to buy additional hardware to get a free os working, is it still truly free for you?"
Well, Linux is not really about money, it's about a lot of other stuff, that's why some people call it Free Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS). And by the way, what's cheaper? Linux or Windows when we talk about price? An OEM copy of Windows costs a 100 dollars or something close to it, and Linux costs zero dollars, and even IF you go and buy a new wireless card that works, and maybe sell your old one on eBay, you still save 60 bucks.
I switched to Linux just about two years ago, and I did so initially because I was tired of having to run antivirus software and crap in that direction, but after having played with it for about one hour I found that a lot more than just the price and security was a huge advantage. My point is that Linux, and Free Software (Read: Freedom) is not about money, you could download Ubuntu, SUSE, Fedora or whatever distro and sell it on the street if you wanted to, nothing prevents you from doing that.
Take Leo Laporte's KFI radio show as an example, when people complain about spyware and *****, he basically say "Buy a Mac", OK, step back for a second and think about that for a minute, the cheapest Mac you can get is 599 dollars, and that's without a monitor! That's a lot of money when you can get a Dell or a piece-of-***** Walmart PC for 200 - 300 bucks and load Linux on it, and you have something that I would say is just as good if not better than a Mac, in terms of functionality and security.
So if you think about Linux is about money and zero-price, sure it's not gratis to use, if you have the wrong sound card you're out of luck as well because the vendor aren't very open about this stuff, but is a car gratis to drive? No it's not, you pay for the gas. And even your computer costs money to use, because you need to pay for electricity.
"That's why this is digg-worthy. Just about any laptop user will benefit from this development."
I agree, if this can get into the mainline kernel tree, Linux will get native support for WPA, which is great, because right now, you need to use something called wpa_supplicant to get that support.
@drizek -
"If your laptop comes with built in wireless then it should work out of the box in linux anyway."
If you get a Centrino-based laptop, yes it should work quite well actually, if the distribution you use includes the firmware it needs to use the wireless card, I know SUSE and Mandriva do. - Technopundit, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Yes, certain Linux distros currently work "out of the box" with certain WiFi cards. Which cards work with which distros is a crapshoot. WiFi cards can be currently purchased on sale for as little as 13 dollars. Having to trash a current card, then hunt down a much more expensive one which may or may not work is simply not worth the effort.
- atdigg, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6Exactly. I especially dislike when people who used Linux for 2 weeks start a big post in which they explain "what Linux needs to succeed" since they are the only ones who see the truth while the rest of the Linux users are too fanatic to think straight.
- bigtomrodney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6I just find that there are too many notions in general about what linux can and can't do. There are too many non linux users making claims about what it can do and where it's shortcomings are. Linux is in an excellent place now, and only getting better. News like this is always welcome.
- starmanjones, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5this will be great. now we need to start working on next gen mesh protocols so we can ***** off ATT/NSA by downloading free linux and over writing windows... comes up working... finds your neighbor... does its TCP/IP thing.
- Tsuroerusu, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5"If you bash anyone, it should be vendors like Broadcomm for offering virtually no documentation to open source developers."
So true, heck people have reverse engineered that Broadcom and some limited support has started to show up, I can guarantee you that if Broadcom released that damn documentation and specs we'd see a driver within 3 months.
"Linux runs great on notebooks (I'm typing this on one that dual boots Fedora Core 4 & Gentoo)."
It's wonderful on notebooks, I was testing SUSE 10.1 RC3 on a friend's notebook, and damn did that KDE desktop look sexy on a good LCD monitor. - drizek, on 10/12/2007, -0/+5well youre wrong. Dapper off the live install cd has a full GUI idiot-proof installer that installed on my laptop and had everything working(correct resolution, wifi, sound, touchpad, etc.) automatically. The install took about 20 minutes and i did it while watching tv.
With windowws xp id say the install time to get all those things working is at least one and a half hours, especially if your networking doesnt work out of the box. - jcostom, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Getting WPA-PSK (or WPA2-PSK, in my case) can certainly be a chore on many distributions. I must commend the Gentoo people for the work they did. I've got Thinkpad T40 with an ipw2100 card inside. For me, it was as simple as:
1. Make sure my kernel (2.6.16) had the appropriate modules built and loaded at boot time (ipw2100, iee80211_crypt_ccmp) from the /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6
2. emerge the ipw2100-firmware & wpa_supplicant packages and create an /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf (10 lines)
3. configure the /etc/conf.d/net file according to the Gentoo docs
4. Create the /etc/init.d/net.eth1 -> net.lo symlink and add net.eth1 to the default runlevel
5. There is no step 5.
Exclusive of kernel compile times, the whole process took maybe 5 minutes. No kidding. - decompyler, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Finally! This has been the single most important thing restricting me from running *nix as a default OS on my notebook. Broadcom chips are a pain in the arse!
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Excellent hope for the future of Desktop Linux
- Tsuroerusu, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5If it's wireless, you could just buy a D-Link AirPlus Xtreme G DWL G650 card, that one works perfectly under Linux and *BSD.
- briangabriel, on 10/12/2007, -2/+6My DLink DL-520 (bought at the local CompUSA) worked out of the box with Breezy and Dapper. I had issues with the LiveCD installer with Dapper Beta 1, but Beta 2 fixed those issues.
- whiterocker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5It's nice to see this, but this is not a driver for any specific hardware, and certainly not a magic bullet for WiFi on Linux. MADWiFi already has an open-source stack like this ported from BSD, so this problem has been solved for a long time. The real problem is Texas Instruments, Conexant and Broadcom continue to be very unfriendly to open source. We are no closer to having these WiFi devices work natively under Linux until some of these vendors release the specs for their chips.
- danormsby, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I worked around the lack of Linux WiFi driver by purchasing a wireless ethernet bridge. Saved me a lot of bother.
- bigtomrodney, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4Have any of you people tried ndiswrapper? It works very well. I have run Atheros chipsets under both the MadWifi drivers and ndiswrapper. Both work equally well. I'm not sure what the reference to Atheros chipsets not working was in the article, both aren't difficult. Still glad to see the stack go GPL.
- asraniel, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4i would suggest a centrino based laptop. but there is one problem with them, they have most of the time ATI cards... but the wireless works great with them.
- Pie_Man, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Yes...If Dapper gets this folded into the mix they will have solved a MAJOR hurdle with pulling in new Linux users.
About time something like this went open. Ndiswrapper is not fun to play with. - Monamo, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3dugg -
I'm looking foward to any positive results that mature from this. After a considerable amount of time as a novice in the Linux realm, I've been working to dedicate a laptop to a single-boot, one flavor install. My lack of knowledge has forced me to stick with dual-boot scenarios because of my limited experience and a spotty coverage of wireless device drivers. - WanderLustMan, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Baby steps....I think getting unsecured wireless to work in Linux is do-able and not too difficult. Getting WPA-PSK protected access on a laptop is just a task that I gave up on a long time ago. Thanks to my neighbor's unsecured router I can jump on a linux laptop to get wireless at times.
I think really solving the wireless dilemma is one of the major stumbling blocks for widespread Linux adoption. - SpasticThinker, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3@Tsuroerusu -
The casual user looking to try linux is not going to want to buy new wireless hardware just to try it out. I can understand that thinking - if your laptop comes with a wireless card, why buy another? Furthermore, if you have to buy additional hardware to get a free os working, is it still truly free for you?
That's why this is digg-worthy. Just about any laptop user will benefit from this development. - richieb, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Agree 100%. I've been using wi-fi on Linux for over 3 years. I still run RH 8.0 on my laptop and it works great with the Orinoco cards. However, having better support for wireless cards is always good.
- SDNick484, on 10/12/2007, -2/+5What's with all these posts bashing Linux's current wireless support? Linux has had great wireless support for years (since midway through 2.4 kernel). Just check out the work on the Madwifi, Orinoco, Prism, or Intel drivers; all are stable and support monitor mode. Name me one Windows driver which supports monitor mode (you can't because none exist). Furthermore, there's nothing in Windows that comes close to the capabilities of host_ap. If you bash anyone, it should be vendors like Broadcomm for offering virtually no documentation to open source developers. Linux runs great on notebooks (I'm typing this on one that dual boots Fedora Core 4 & Gentoo).
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4It never ceases to amaze me how hard-headed people are when it comes to hardware. I had trouble with a wifi card in linux, went to Fry's and dropped $15 on an old Linksys card with a prism2 chipset, came home and fired up kismet. No problems whatsoever.
Moral of the story: sometimes things should be replaced. - mentor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3While this is cool, and a big thumbs up to the company for realeasing the code, this only appears to be an 802.11 layer/stack. BSD already has one, which has been imported, for instance, into the madwifi driver; obviously, it would be good if we just had one 802.11 layer/stack though.
The real problem with wireless drivers is twofold:
- that the FCC and various other regulatory authorities place restrictions on what frequencies and powers at which these cards can broadcast; these are often implemented in software on the host machine, and the rules say that people shouldn't be able to easily modify the frequencies/powers.
- that we have the standard "we can't release our specification" stuff from hardware makers, because they don't want to compete purely on features, reliability, cost, etc - all those useless metrics.
So, despite this new stack, we still haven't got more drivers.
Props to Atheros for giving us the ability to make the cool MADWifi driver. - cdgore, on 10/12/2007, -1/+4Dapper has already passed the feature freeze point, but there's always Edgy Eft to look forward to.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Me, currently I am installing Dapper and have used the liveCD on a variety of systems with different wireless cards, and I am amazed at how many it actually supports, I agree that it could be improved, but its pretty good. WiFi has came a long way since even 6 months ago in linux where Fedora Core 5 had 0 support for it to now where I throw a live CD in and it "just works". Even more awesome is the dapper text insall, it detects for wireless cards and does the apt update in the text install.
:) - lovedaddy, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I'm suprised no one has mentioned the rt2x00 driver project (http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com) - if we can get a nice standard 80211 into the kernel, it should mean we can get better per chipset support, which can only be a good thing.
What we need now is people mailing the remaining wifi chipset manufactures to get a GPL driver going, so we can at last get rid of this whole wrapper nonesence. - mcflynnthm, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2This is great to hear. I was running Debian on my PowerBook for a while (why, you ask? because I could. sorta) and the wireless thing was what caused me to jump back to OSX. That and OSX just worked so well with the hardware. Can't imagine why :P
At any rate, now maybe I can put Linux on this other laptop I have sitting around. - pdiddle, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2The day I can get rid of ndiswrapper is a damn fine day.
- tpv2066, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Site is dugg-dead
http://www.duggmirror.com/linux_unix/Linux_WiFi_Leaps_Forward/ - scheper, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4Dapper and Breezy worked out of the box with my wifi, something no other distro did. Which made me happy.
- gahal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@ Technopundit: '...legal support for various media formats...stumbling block(s) to Linux functionality'.
I agree that legal support for media formats is a major stumbling block. The major one I can think of is for playing a DVD. Including legal support for media formats as a problem tells me that you live in the USA (land of the free).
I also live in the "land of the free", where laws prevent me from playing a movie that I own, on hardware that I own, without being a criminal.
This is more of a political problem than it is a tech problem.
For example: You install Ubuntu in the USA, and go to watch a DVD. No dice. Check on why and find a script to make it work. Run the script and are told: 'blah blah blah, this installs code to play DVD movies, blah blah blah this is only legal if you live outside of the "land of the free".
(sorry, just makes me bitter when I am told that I cannot watch the movie on a disk that I BOUGHT, where I want. Guess I went a good bit off topic there.) - richbradshaw, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2In Kanotix I booted, opened the gui version of ndiswrapper, chose the driver, clicked "yes I want WPA support "and it was done. Why do other distros not include this?
- brentcore, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@popfrogs,
yeah, but does it have an external antenna connector? Is 802.11g or b? These are the kinds of extras that people really want to have for their wifi card, and its a total crapshoot trying to get all those things in a single card that works with linux and kismet right out of the box. Trust me, this is a good thing. If anything, it gives people less of an excuse/obstacle to not try out linux. 802.11 support has been one of the few things where linux was totally behind windows (due to no fault of open source developers), so it's great to see a project like this pick up. - mbish0p, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2If you think Windows device support is wonderful, I truly hope you get stuck installing Windows XP on a machine with SATA and no floppy drive.
- omirix, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Correct. Wireless support for Linux has kept me from completely switching for the last 3 years. Otherwise, I'd have it running on my school computer, home desktop, and every other box that I own.
I guarantee the majority of new Linux users that switched back to Windows was from little wireless support. - chowsapal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There's a broadcom module in Dapper. Search the Ubuntu forums for bcm43xx -- there's a relatively simple tutorial to get it running.
- gahal, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@ Misos: I have to partially disagree with your statement of:
"The problem with Linux, as I've said before, is that only recently have distro developers started targeting the average user."
A few years back Mandrake (now mandriva) released Mandrake 8. I want to say that this was around 2001, give or take a year. Mandrake 8 was a vast improvement over their previous releases, and also a very user and newbie friendly release.
The GUI installer was extremely easy to use and it was a very fast install, about half the time it took to install windows 98 on the same computer. It had a very easy to use GUI for fdisk(ing). And had categorized lists of software you could elect to install or not install (all check-boxes in the GUI). If you had no idea of what to select you could just pick what the computer was being used for and it automatically made a preselected choices for you.
This was very nice for a newbie to see what packages were by default considered needed for a workstation vs a server etc.
After this fast and easy, yet flexible install, the the way the system was setup would offer to hold your hand if you wanted... or just stay out of your way if you told it to.
Granted modern distros are even better for newbies, have simpler installers, and are easier to use overall (I'm thinking mainly of ubuntu). Yet this was about 5 years ago, and I still consider Mandrake 8 easier to install and basically use than Windows.
Please keep in mind that I am not completely disagreeing with Misos, as he is correct in many regards.
***not 100% on everything here, it has been a number of years since I have used this. I am sure I made mistakes here, but the general concept should be correct. Feel free to correct me. Just hope I am right on the version number of 8, since I find the current mandrivia website to be not exactly friendly *** - mentor, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm waiting for a combined Atheros + Blueetooth Mini-PCI card :P
- opennet, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1here is a little screener from a ubuntu machine running kismet- via a drone on a wrt54g with dd-wrt firmware. a vast improvement over the standard scan included in firmware. also gui frontend gkismet installed with few problems after lib-gnome install (i run kde but gnome programs run fine with debian menu)
http://opensourceservers.googlepages.com/linuxwifi
it works if you work it. - quokkapox, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There's a really easy way to try out Linux with flawless wireless: just download the free (as in beer) VMWare Player, and download a pre-installed Linux virtual machine. I had a virtual ubuntu breezy badger running on my XP laptop in no time. Windows XP handles the builtin wireless card as usual, and VMware handles the NAT for the virtual linux machine, which just thinks it's plugged in to an ethernet LAN which provides DHCP.
Very slick -- this worked fine with both Ubuntu breezy and Puppy Linux distros I downloaded off the net.
Obviously you really want linux running on the bare hardware, but just to try it out, nothing beats the vmware player. - brentcore, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2yes, damn straight this is exciting. I've been looking for a new wifi card that will a) work out of the box with linux after a clean and easy driver install, b) has an external antenna connector to attach a cantenna for wardriving, c) is capable of doing rfmon for kismet for WEP cracking, and d) is 802.11g capable. Surprisingly, many wifi cards that satisfy a,b, and c only have 802.11b technology and no g, which totally blows. Hopefully this new project can open things up a bit and offer more wireless solutions to linux users. This card looks like a potential candidate http://www.radiolabs.com/products/wireless/networking/buffalo-wireless-notebook-card.php though I'm not sure if it supports rfmon. The old orinoco gold cards use to be good, but ever since they upgraded from b to g, they stopped putting in an external antenna connector.
- zombiedog, on 10/12/2007, -4/+5Excellent. I would love to migrate to Linux, but my main use: wifi just ain't there, so I'm stuck with windoze.
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