Michael A. Peters wrote:
On Fri, 2005-11-25 at 19:08 -0500, Temlakos wrote:
And I agree with you: the fault for the chronic WiFi problems lies with
manufacturers who won't cooperate with the open-source movement.
In some cases - it is the FCC that may actually be at fault.
The FCC has regulations on what devices can be user configurable - with
respect to how much power can be sent to the antenna.
Some cards control that via a chip, but that's more expensive than via
software/firmware. But because of the FCC regulation, such
software/firmware has to be closed to the user.
This is why some cards have non open firmware that has to be used, and I
believe it is also why madwifi uses a closed source HAL (rest of madwifi
is open source).
I have a couple of prism54 cards that work fine, but you need their
firmware blob (which came with the card, but not with FC and so doesn't
work 'out of the box'). The firmware blob is for the on-card ARM
processor; the card has a whole computer on-board.
My net laptop has Atheros wireless, and as I figure it it does not have
its own CPU, so whatever is done in the prism54's blob is done in the
Atheros card by the host CPU using OCO firmware. I gather that if the
source for the HAL (the firmware) were released, then (evil) hackers
could hack on it and use the devices to interfere with air traffic
control and (maybe) military.
SUSE 10 does contain everything needed to get the Atheros wireless
working, and for that reason that's what's on my laptop as of yesterday.
I'm tired of downloading drivers for this, for that, for the other.
--
Cheers
John
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