I found it very difficult to get wifi cards compatible with linux. I used to get Prism II chipset cards, which worked beautifully. The Prism chipset (formerly Orinoco) is ancient, and so drivers have been around for a long time.
Unfortunately most manufacturers who used to use Prism chips now use one of the more recent chipsets that are unsupported in Linux - generally because the manufacturers are unwilling to publish any details about how the chips work, presumably because they are very badly built.
So, I was pleased to discover that the Atheros chipset is supported with the dubiously named MadWifi drivers.
Although they’ve still not cut a proper release, the CVS version works very nicely, even on my still quite bleeding edge 64-bit Athlon system. Some issues around WEP, but with some experimentation it works very well with 802.11b and g. I haven’t tried the 802.11a support yet in Linux though.
The MadWifi drivers have a closed-source component which is a real pain - it means the drivers will never be accepted into the mainline kernel (although the closed-source HAL might be loadable somehow). The excuse given is pretty garbled, and it doesn’t really make sense.
Apparently:
- Some regulatory agencies wouldn’t like it
- Some unspecified naughty people might be naughty
What precisely these regulatory agencies would do if the source were published I am not sure (perhaps they’d switch off the Internet to stop people discovering this secret-that-must-not-be-known?). Similarly, exactly why I should care about some people who might do bad things is beyond me.
These are just the kinds of feeble excuses that have always been used for keeping things secret, and they are just as wrong.
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