Scot L. Harris wrote (about wireless Ethernet cards):
>
> I have an A1 rev card. Would be nice if they made up their minds as to
> which chip set to use! :)
>
> This is one area that Linux in general (not just Fedora) has major
> problems. There should be some kind of industry standard abstraction
> layer for communicating with wireless cards. That way it would not
> matter what chip set you had on the card, it would just work.
>
> And then the manufacturers seem to just grab what ever chip set is
> cheapest this week and put it out with the same model numbers. That
> just confuses the whole issue.
To be fair, D-Link have been doing this just as much with wired
Ethernet. Worse, they then don't make updated drivers available easily.
This has meant that Linux will pick up the chipset, use the generic
driver, and Just Work, whereas Windows will demand a card-specific
driver. If you happened to get a bare card, you're rather stuck.
I think we can take this analogy a stage further. Ethernet chips are
commodity, very very cheap, and there's little innovation except at the
high end. And there are good Linux drivers easily available for all the
major chipsets.
With any luck, we'll see the industry standardising before too long: I
doubt that the increase of speeds that we have been seeing will continue
at its current rate. Hopefully we'll see some consolidation, and the
position around each chipset will be clearer.
(We might even see a repetition of the wired experience. Manufacturers
have wanted standard cards for a server range, they've wanted to put
standard Linux server (especially Red Hat) products on them, and so have
insisted on parts with good Open Source drivers. So practically all
Ethernet chips need Linux drivers to be able to compete.)
James.
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E-mail address: james | My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
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| Pro patria mori. -- Wilfred Owen
