Re: Slightly OT - Wireless

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Even bigger problem with 802.11g: all of the drivers are proprietary and will taint your kernel. They also can introduce bugs, which you can't fix of course, since the drivers are proprietary.

A few companies have tried to "dress up" proprietary drivers and "market" them as "open source", but they're not.

One guy did a fine job of designing and publishing "open" drivers for the Atheros chipset, but, he was hamstrung by an NDA, and, the resulting drivers are in fact proprietary and may even violate the GPL under which Linux is licensed.

Alas, 802.11g has gone the way of LoseModems. 

Being a free-software zealot myself, I only use old-skool REAL modems (the 3Com ISA bus, external, or PCMCIA variety) and old-skool 802.11b wireless cards.

Regardless of ideology and principles, in general support for 802.11b hardware is quite mature on Linux and BSD as well. Due to its proprietary nature, from a practical standpoint, I suspect that 802.11g support will take longer or may not ever reach the same maturity.

- -ken
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On Fri, Aug 01, 2003 at 01:15:48PM -0700, J/ wrote:
> 802.11g is great, faster/etc -- and some of the 802.11g systems provide
> several choices for encryption.  I've had no problem with 802.11g and
> penetrating walls/etc.
> 
> Linksys allows you to chose between "gateway" or "router" mode.
> 
> Only one problem with 802.11g -- there are VERY few drivers out there
> that work, and none that I know of that have the encryption you want. 
> At this point it's at least 3 months out for ok alpha drivers for any
> 802.11g products using the broadcom chipset -- as far as I can tell. 
> Although I hear rumour there are alpha drivers for it, I've never been
> able to get the rumourmongers to substantiate their rumours.
> 
> Hope that helps...
> 
> J/  -- oh and the 802.11a/g cards there are a few chipsets that ARE
> supported in linux, go figure.
> 
> On Fri, 2003-08-01 at 13:10, John S. Andersen wrote:
> > Ok, I'm sick of dragging my long cat 5 cable around the house
> > when working on my Sony and I'm ready to jump into wireless.
> > 
> > Any recommendations?  (Hint must work with Linux - DUH!)
> > 
> > Somepeople tell me 802.11g is the way to go because its faster, 
> > others say 802.11b is enough.  
> > 
> > I also want working security, encryption that works for 
> > 
> > I need some wall penetration capability because of the way my 
> > location is arranged, and some say the 802.11g products are actually 
> > worse at this than the 11b due to the frequency in use.  
> > 
> > I'd also like a BRIDGING access point as opposed to a ROUTER because 
> > (as I understand it) a bridging ap puts the wireless segments in the 
> > same subnet as the wired lan, (which means windows peer-to-peer stuff 
> > works) where as a router sets a different subnet for the wireless 
> > stations (and MS SMB packets don't traverse lan segments).  Or am I 
> > all wet on this point???  
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
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