Re: [Fsuk-manchester] Wireless cards with free drivers

[Dave Page]

On Thu, Feb 21, 2008 at 09:17:02PM +0000, Paul Waring wrote:

> At the last FS Manchester meeting, someone (Matt I think) said that they
> used a particular make of wireless card which had free (as in speech)
> drivers available. Can anyone remember what this was? The one piece of
> hardware which refuses to work on my Thinkpad is the built-in wireless
> and I'd like to be able to make full use of my machine under GNU/Linux
> if possible (also, the 10m ethernet cable trailing across the floor of
> my flat is beginning to annoy me!).

Various Ralink chipsets have manufacturer-supported GPL drivers via the
rt2x00 project at http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com and Linux Emporium will
sell you cards at http://www.linuxemporium.co.uk/products/wireless/

The downside is that while you can manually configure these cards with
iwconfig etc., they don't support scanning and don't work with
network-manager (at least on the Debian and Ubuntu systems I've seen). I
don't think that rt2x00 is still under active development either.

Out-of-the-box Free wireless support is still nonexistent AFAIK.

Dave
-- 
Dave Page <address@hidden>
Jabber: address@hidden