On Sun, 2006-01-29 at 15:20 +0000, Anne Wilson wrote: > On Saturday 28 Jan 2006 23:19, John Summerfied wrote: > > > > > broadcom is a great brand to avoid. Last Great Step Forward I head > > from the broadcom reverse-engineers that they had fully documented > > the interfaces and were ready to begin the Next Great Step. I got the > > impression usable code was some way off. > > > My Acer laptop has a Broadcom wireless connection, using ipw2200. It > works out-of-the-box with Mandriva. I haven't tried it with FC4 yet, > but I see no reason why not. > > Anne > I've not seen the original poster show the output from lspci (type /sbin/lspci -v at the prompt in a Terminal from the Applications/System Tools menu) here...perhaps I've not been following closely enough...but my Belkin "Wireless G Desktop Card" (ver.5000 per the box label) has a Atheros 5212 chip on it and hence I use the madwifi kernel module from Livna with it. At least one version of a commonly available D-Link card also uses the 5212 so just dumping one card for another may not help at all. And yes, this driver gets snippy when passed parameters from iwconfig that it doesn't understand (like mode auto) but it works well here even when parameter problems aren't fixed in ifcfg-ath0. If you are picky about the ethics of using ndiswrapper and a Windoze driver, Madwifi isn't quite as bad as those fully proprietary drivers, but the HAL is closed so it isn't completely open...but I can't see it as being appreciably worse that loading firmware on certain other implementations. At least Atheros seems to be trying to provide a solution that both works for linux users and keeps the FCC off their backs. Until the cleanroom reverse engineering projects on other chipsets is much further along, non-hacker Linux users have limited choices...but the whole tangled mess is being organized under the watchful eye of John Linville so there is hope. :) It ought to be clearly stated that a wireless card just ain't gonna play unless you are loading the correct driver...trying to get the wrong driver to work is less fun than beating yourself about the head and shoulders with a ballpeen hammer...so guessing at the card's chipset just won't cut it. OEMs seem to have a penchant for changing chips on a whim so that V1 of a card sold under a certain branding may be one thing and V2 may be something entirely different...thus you need to run lspci to see what was actually in the box. As convenient as GUIs are, sometimes you can't get there from here without running command line tools so getting a little comfortable with Gnome Terminal (or the KDE equivalent) is going to save a lot of pain in the long run. HTH, Karen
