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Wireless Networking Software Hardware Linux

State of WLAN Support on Linux? 608

Posted by Cliff from the plug-and-play? dept.
ntropic asks: "I/ve recently bought a Belkin 802.11G USB adapter and was dismayed to find, after a few hours of struggling with it, that there seems to be no one who has managed to get it working under Linux. During the search for clues, it seemed that sum total of Linux support for wireless networking are the linux-wlan project, and the linuxant wrappers for Windows drivers. The former seems to support only Prism chipsets while the latter is a commercial solution, albeit quite an inexpensive one. Is that all, or are there better sources for wireless networking support?"
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State of WLAN Support on Linux? More

State of WLAN Support on Linux?

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  • ndiswrapper (Score:5, Insightful)

    by aurelito ( 566884 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:47PM (#14544416)
    http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] Lets you use original Windows drivers on linux. Not pretty, but it works pretty well. Meanwhile, blame manufacturers.

    • Re:ndiswrapper (Score:4, Informative)

      by DarkClown ( 7673 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:59PM (#14544526) Homepage
      I'm using a Belkin 802.11G adapter with ndiswrapper. Works like a charm for me - just be sure and have the ndiswrapper sources around to make for when you do kernel upgrades...

      • Re:ndiswrapper (Score:5, Informative)

        by DaveAtFraud ( 460127 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @11:43PM (#14545869) Homepage Journal
        ...Works like a charm for me - just be sure and have the ndiswrapper sources around to make for when you do kernel upgrades...
        If you're using a rpm based distro such as Fedora, you might look into setting up Livna [livna.org] as a repository for yum and then just get the appropriate ndiswrapper rpm from them. The folks at Livna do a really good job of publishing a recompiled ndiswrapper rpm whenever the kernel gets updated.

        I'm running ndiswrapper under Fedora Core 4 (x86_64) on a HP Pavillion laptop with a built-in Broadcomm wireless NIC. Works great.

    • Re:ndiswrapper (Score:2, Informative)

      by aztechClanIII ( 536891 )
      works beautifully for me. Linksys wireless G and B PCMCIA cards. This is likely why no one is reverse-engineering them anymore, no point.

    • the blame game (Score:3, Insightful)

      by mnemonic_ ( 164550 )
      I think the story submitter wanted practical information, not to partake in the blame game. Here it is: WLAN support is abysmal on Linux compared to that on Windows or OS X. You'll be hunting for driver support (if it exists) or spending a couple hours fiddling with ndiswrapper. Pile on the routine annoyances of Linux (the handful of commands necessary to connect to any AP) and you'll get frustrated quickly. No sugar coating; WLAN on Linux sucks.

      Yes, we all know that blaming the establishment is very co

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:50PM (#14545332)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:the blame game (Score:3, Informative)

        by jsight ( 8987 )
        Well, to be fair, this isn't always the case. Ubuntu for instance worked perfectly on the first try with my Centrino based laptop.
      • It is the manufacturer's fault. And ndiswrapper is a solution for Linux wireless. Linux requires a bit of homework with regard to wireless. But once it works, Gentoo scripts has everything work fine. I've noticed that hardware that supports Linux work better, like Winmodems.

      • A Modest Proposal (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Kadin2048 ( 468275 ) <.ten.yxox. .ta. .nidak.todhsals.> on Tuesday January 24, 2006 @12:21AM (#14546051) Homepage Journal
        Well, I'm glad somebody finally came out and said it. That's been my experience also.

        I have a HP Workstation with what I thought was a Linux-compatible WL PCI card in it, of course when I got the card home and out of the box, I read the small print -- this was the "new and improved" version 3, and only versions 1 and 2 were compatible with native Linux drivers.

        So I'm stuck using ndiswrapper. Which does work, just not very well or conveniently. Changing from one network to another is a 10-minute process involving multiple "coffee breaks" (click on something, wait several minutes) and a full reboot. That's right, a complete reboot -- on a system which otherwise never, ever gets rebooted. I'm just glad it's not a laptop, at least as a desktop this setup is usable, since the network's SSID never changes.

        To say that Linux wireless is a little "rough around the edges" (this seems to be the party line on a lot of forums) is a bit of an understatement, in my opinion. It's terrible, and while I do blame the manufacturers for producing undocumented products, its the users who end up holding the bag and Linux that ends up looking bad.

        Here's my thought for a 'solution,' or at least a stopgap: the problem isn't that Linux-compatible WL cards don't exist, it's that they're very hard to find and poorly marked. (Witness my "v3" problem.) What somebody with a lot of money needs to do, either an enterprising individual or an organization, is find a manufacturer that makes a well-supported WL card (one that uses a Prism chipset, probably) and contract to buy a production run of them in OEM packaging. Call them whatever you want, toss them in a white box with a driver CD, and sell them for $20 more than they cost.

        The community doesn't need support for every brand and flavor and revision and chipset of WL card out there. What we need is one card that's available for more than six months that's easy to get ahold of and actually works. The Linux hardware review sites do part of this, but they don't really let you actually buy the part -- you're stuck trying to find a source for the correct version/revision card yourself, and SOL if you can't find it (as is the case with many of the older "known good" Prism cards).

        As I've said in other posts, look at the other major non-Windows platform and the reputation it has for wireless connectivity -- the Mac. Macs only have ONE TYPE of wireless card. They avoid the manufacturer issue altogether by just OEMing one or two chipsets, selling it at a ridiculous premium, and building the driver support into the OS. And it works beautifully; I've yet to find a Mac user who doesn't think that their Airport card wasn't worth the $90 they spent on it. (Okay except for some hackers who want the ability to grab raw frames...)

        We can blame the manufacturers all we want, but it's obvious that as a group they're going to ignore the Linux platform. However, there's a demand for Linux wireless cards that actually work without hassle or confusion, and they do exist, they're just hard to find. Somebody with the right amount of capital and connections needs to match the two up.
        • the problem isn't that Linux-compatible WL cards don't exist, it's that they're very hard to find and poorly marked. (Witness my "v3" problem.)

          I've had similar problems with "new improved versions". The reason why this is worse for wireless hardware seems to be:
          1. The hardware seems to be very short-lived, with each "version" only being around for a short time. By the time the driver has been written the hardware is off the shelves.
          2. New "versions" of the hardware aren't progressive improvements, they ar

    • Where is our Hardware Compatability List website? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Burz ( 138833 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:39PM (#14545274) Homepage Journal
      ...something friendly and easy to browse when shopping for hardware. Why distro vendors are not collaborating on maintaining an HCL site is a mystery to me, as it would be a powerful tool in persuading HW vendors to offer support.

      There is one at Linuxdevices.org, but its just a glorified messaging board and mostly out of date anyway.

      I also find it unsettling that Linux users keep buying peripherals without checking compatability first, and end up /rewarding/ manufacturers that don't support Linux.

      The real weak spots in Linux drivers are for dialup modems and Wifi cards. And Bluetooth adapters. Oh and Intel video is still broken.

      Soundcard support is pretty decent, until you realize the OS often implicitly locks-out multiple apps from outputting audio... so uses involving alerts and alarms (timers, calendars, IMs, softphones, etc.) cannot be relied upon. Obviously this is also an obsctruction for musicians and DJs. But ya gotta maintain compatability with 1991 apps so the brokenness stays.

      No one below the GTK+/Qt layer is paying attention to desktop use-cases, and those GUI developers are left helpless on many issues because of it. Otherwise I would not have to write the above paragraph about audio. Also, there would be stable ABIs for drivers and applications (which only removes the freedom to change the architechture BETWEEN major OS releases).

      As for NDISwrapper... Thank you Microsoft, for providing a stable ABI that allows me to use my USB Wifi card on Linux!
      • Maintaining a database of all the hardware which works for linux is hard, it'd be asier to keep track of what hardware doesn't work. These days we have MODULE_DEVICE_TABLE: in every module: This exports the list of the IDs that every modules support. Recolect the IDs of all modules and you'd get a sort of automated database of all the devices supported by linux

        Soundcard support is pretty decent, until you realize the OS often implicitly locks-out multiple apps from outputting audio.

        Applications using alsa d

        • Re:Where is our Hardware Compatability List websit (Score:4, Insightful)

          by MattBurke ( 58682 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2006 @12:56AM (#14546210)
          Applications using alsa doesn't suffer such problems. Stop using apps that use /dev/dsp directly....

          OK so you want developers to break compatability with non-Linux platforms and you want users to abandon their software and just use something else (ignoring the fact that in a lot of cases "something else" doesn't exist, is broken, unreliable, unsupported, etc)?

          Makes sense... And after all, people porting code to run on other OS's *really* enjoy re-writing huge chunks of Linux specific junk...
      • The real weak spots in Linux drivers are for dialup modems...

        I have been using Linux for 11 years, the whole time using dialup, with many different machines, and I never had a problem with a dialup modem. All of them simply worked out of the box, no configuration required. I used to run dual boot with Windows, and at least two of the modems that I had, that ran perfectly well with Linux, simply completely refused to work with Windows, and for several other modems I had to download drivers and configure them

  • Try ndiswrapper (Score:5, Insightful)

    by thewldisntenuff ( 778302 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:47PM (#14544419) Homepage

    What about ndiswrapper [sourceforge.net]? Have you tried that yet? Some distros have ndiswrapper built/shipped with them. (SUSE does, IIRC) You'll have particular issues with wireless cards that use Broadcom chipsets - Broadcom won't release info about the chipset to any open-source groups. However, if you can get your hands on and can compile ndiswrapper for your machine, it should work well. Ndiswrapper has come a long way since I first tried it, and it's the only way I can use the Broadcom AirFoce 54g on my Acer laptop.

    I've used the Linuxant software in the past when ndiswrapper failed me. The support was excellent and they support almost any wireless device you can think of. $20 isn't bad either, for a lifetime license....

    As far as the "state of WLAN support", blame the people who build the chipsets (Broadcom, et al) and market forces. If they were willing to either open up the necessary information to linux developers or have their own coders write drivers for linux we'd not have this problem. Of course, if Linux had greater marketshare, we'd probably see more linux drivers as well. This argument goes for most hardware and linux in general, though....

    • Re:Try ndiswrapper (Score:3, Insightful)

      by drinkypoo ( 153816 )

      As far as the "state of WLAN support", blame the people who build the chipsets (Broadcom, et al) and market forces.

      Or in other words, whether you realize it or not (I suspect and hope you do) blame the other Linux users. People buying whatever and expecting support is the root problem. If people only bought hardware with good linux support, more hardware would be well-supported.



      • Or in other words, whether you realize it or not (I suspect and hope you do) blame the other Linux users. People buying whatever and expecting support is the root problem. If people only bought hardware with good linux support, more hardware would be well-supported.

        BRAVO!

        Most consumers fail to realize that their wallets are the most powerful voting terminals they have (yep! more potent than electronic voting machines that produce 3000 votes out of thin air). Your wallet is your weapon in capitalism. I

    • Re:Try ndiswrapper (Score:3, Insightful)

      by QuantumG ( 50515 )
      You know what they say about good intentions? Yeah. That's what I think of ndiswrapper. I wonder how many manufacturers have actually considered making a native Linux driver and then discovered that their windows drivers work just fine with ndiswrapper and havn't bothered. I wonder how many kernel hackers have sat down and started reverse engineering a windows driver and then given up after they discovered that it works just fine with ndiswrapper.

    • Re:Try ndiswrapper (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Coldeagle ( 624205 ) *
      One of the comical things is Broadcom has Linux drivers that they use internally and on their AP's. From what I understand, BC uses the same Chipset on their AP's and adapters. Many of those AP's run on Linux (I.E. Linksys WRT54G), thus they have the code. I am just curious whether or not BC is violating GPL by not supplying the code, since they have done the work.
      --
      "I think; therefore, I am Libertarian"
  • Yeah, I had a similar disenchanting experience with USB Wi-Fi adapters on Linux. Eventually gave up on the project and just put Windows on the box.

  • rt2x00 (Score:5, Informative)

    by cortana ( 588495 ) <sam@robots[ ]g.uk ['.or' in gap]> on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:48PM (#14544430) Homepage
    As long as you don't need WPA, get a card with an rt2x00 series chip. The drivers work fine, though they are not yet good enough to be merged into the kernel. http://rt2x00.serialmonkey.com/ [serialmonkey.com]

    • Re:rt2x00 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Daengbo ( 523424 ) <daengbo@gmail. c o m> on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:59PM (#14544528) Homepage Journal
      The most common of these chips right now is the RaLink 2500, used in many laptops. The driver was open sourced in early 2005 and lacked some important features at the time, such as managed networks. The driver now is stable, though, and causes me no problems on my laptop except needing to be unloaded before suspending.

      For what it's worth, Ubuntu supports this chip out of the box with their restricted modules package, and I didn't have to do any CLI work to get the chip working under Breezy on my latest laptop, unlike a similar model that I bought last year which I spent a fair amount of time researching the chip and compiling the driver under Warty. Under Breezy, it only required filling in the necessary info in the standard network configuration dialog.
  • The last time I did research on this subject, I found the ndiswrapper, which seems to work ok with my linksys 54g pcmcia adapter. Ndiswrapper is open source and works great from my experience.
  • Funny, my ThinkPad with Intel (gag!) wireless seems to work flawlessly. The main kernel tree drivers are still a bit flaky, but the ipw2200 drivers are rock-solid.

  • The problem, I think, is always the same... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Lead Butthead ( 321013 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:50PM (#14544453) Journal
    Manufacturer won't release information on hardware. So the only way to find out how to interface with it is to reverse engineer the windows driver, a tedious enterprise. If it's really an issue, return the product and tell the retailer why it is being returned. Enough people doing that, the manfacturer will have to bend if it wants the business.
    • No, people doing that is why retailers get more and more restrictive return policies and why lots of stuff comes in impossible to reseal packaging. If the box doesn't say it works with Linux, I have no idea why people assume that it will.

      I'm not actually sure wtf submitter was thinking.. hopefully next time they will research purchases for their Linux boxes a bit more carefully before plonking down their cash. Wishful thinking won't make drivers magically appeal. If the traditionally less spendthrift Mac co

      • Re:The problem, I think, is always the same... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Karma Farmer ( 595141 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @08:01PM (#14544558)
        hopefully next time they will research purchases for their Linux boxes a bit more carefully before plonking down their cash.

        It should be noted that you generally have no way of knowing the internal chipset in a network adapter from anything printed on the outside of the box. Manufacturers often sell two or more entirely different devices under exactly the same name, in exactly the same packaging, with nothing to distinguish them except serial numbers.

        • It should be noted that you generally have no way of knowing the internal chipset in a network adapter from anything printed on the outside of the box. Manufacturers often sell two or more entirely different devices under exactly the same name, in exactly the same packaging, with nothing to distinguish them except serial numbers.

          It should be noted that you should do some research and find this kind of shit out ahead of time, and choose who to buy from and what to buy accordingly.

          Incidentally, this

  • Clunk click.
    Found my highly generic Atmel chip set WLAN card (USB), configured instantly, on-line in less than 3 minutes from inserting the card.

    Kubuntu and Knoppix both failed totally.

    Steve

    • Re:Suse 10 (Score:5, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:59PM (#14544537)
      That's because ndiswrapper is included with Suse 10, but not with knoppix or kubuntu.

      Let's make sure we take a chance somewhere in this list to thank the developers who've made it possible to use ANY wireless NIC with Linux.

      Thanks guys.

    • Re:Suse 10 (Score:2, Informative)

      by uranus65 ( 837545 )
      OpenSuse 10 recognized and configured my D-Link DWL-G650 PCMCIA card. It might also work with D-Link's newer USB stuff. I'm finding OpenSuse 10 to be the best distro I've found so far to deal with hardware issues...easily. Best Buy sells D-Link stuff and is pretty cool about returns as long as you didn't trash the box.

  • Linux and wireless (Score:5, Informative)

    by Akaihiryuu ( 786040 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:53PM (#14544481)
    Not sure what chipset your wireless card uses, but if it's Broadcom, there are 2 solutions now. 1) http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net] lets you use Windows drivers on Linux. 2) http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ [berlios.de] the native Broadcom driver is stabilizing now. It's experimental at this state, but people are using it on both x86 and ppc. I think you have to have a 2.6.15 or later kernel to use that though. I'm still using ndiswrapper for mine, it works okay until the native drivers are stabilized more.

  • do your homework before your splurge your money? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by atari2600 ( 545988 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:53PM (#14544483)
    Perhaps you should have found out the dismal support part before you purchased the adapter. Duh.
  • I think that many of the chipset makers are afraid of the legal liability that widespread software controllable radios could bring on. I'm actually suprised that some jackass hasn't been caught jamming police or airport radios.
    • Well I'm sure there are limitations as to the range, there's no reason why they should be able to transmit below Channel 1 or above Channel 14. So there are probably hard wired locks on going outside of the range, at least to make the FCC happy. However making a 802.11B/G signal jammer would be a possibility.
    • I think that many of the chipset makers are afraid of the legal liability that widespread software controllable radios could bring on. I'm actually suprised that some jackass hasn't been caught jamming police or airport radios.

      In my part of the World, police radios use frequencies around 470MHz. Radios designed to transmit at 2.4GHz and 5GHz don't tend to work too well at 470MHz. It is not too hard to make a wide band receiver, however wideband transmitters tend to be efficient at a given band and then most

  • 802.11g under linux is somewhat messy. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by wangmaster ( 760932 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:54PM (#14544490)
    802.11g under linux is sort of a mess. Wireless cards are getting cheaper and cheaper (in terms of manufacturing) and much of this cheapness is cutting corners, taking more logic off the cards and putting it into software (drivers/firmware).

    The vast majority of 802.11g cards out there are almost entirely controlled by software. The frequency, transmit power, etc. I believe the specs to this are all goverend by the FCC (in the US at least, I'm sure most other nations have their own governmental bodies governing what can and can't be done).

    As such, opensource drivers are tough as you don't want anyone just modifying the code to change frequencies, up transmit power etc. Also, a number of manufacturers have used "competition" as their reason for keeping things closed.

    As a result, the support out there is lumped into a few different chunks:
    1) no drivers available
    2) atheros drivers (contain a binary HAL object file. This allows them to have a small source component that people can build that links against the binary object which contains the routines to do the various things I mentioned above (basically control the card)
    3) opensource driver + firmware (where the firmware component does what the HAL does, but since it's actual firmware loaded to the card, it allows the driver interface to be fully opensourced without revealing too much of what's going on. The intel and prism54 drivers are in this camp.

    Basically, if you don't have a prism54 or intel based 802.11g card, you can't use open source drivers, and the drivers will never be included into the kernel because they can't be open sourced. Atheros was nice to release their stuff so that at least their cards are usable.

    Every other manufacturer's card users need to hope that their mfg is nice enough to do what atheros does (or if their driver is firmware based, do what intel/intersil[or whoever owns the prism54 stuff now] did by either writing drivers, or helping with it.

    It makes it tough if you don't know this ahead of time, but really with 802.11g, you just need to pick the right card and hope. Unfortunately none of this is really very well documented.

  • Madwifi (Score:5, Informative)

    by secureboot ( 920488 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:56PM (#14544505)
    Absolutely untrue. Madwifi [madwifi.org] has support for a ton of b/g chipsets based on Atheros stuff. You can pick up a nice DLink DWL-520 for cheap, and it'll work great. (at least, that's what I think i picked up a few months ago... its something like that, at least).
    • I'll second the parent comment.

      I've been using a D-Link DWL-G650 (Atheros chipset) with the Madwifi drivers quite successfully for a while now. Even have WPAv2 working. This is using Gentoo and its awesome wrapper config scripts for network/wireless setup.

      Prior to this card, I had a Netgear WG511 which worked using the Prism54 drivers. But then it died and I got an RMA replacement...the replacement I received (same hardware revision, mind you) did not work because of something that they offloaded from the h

  • Ralink (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MSG ( 12810 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:58PM (#14544524)
    Which one? The Belkin F5D7050 has GPL drivers from the chipset manufacturer for Linux, Free/Net/OpenBSD, Mac OS X, and Windows.

    http://ralink.rapla.net/ [rapla.net]

  • Wireless drivers (Score:5, Informative)

    by JWSmythe ( 446288 ) <jwsmythe@nospam.jwsmythe.com> on Monday January 23, 2006 @07:59PM (#14544538) Homepage Journal
    You aparently didn't come across the biggest Linux wireless site that I know of.

    http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Lin ux/ [hp.com]

    The only wireless device that I haven't managed to make work is the Broadcom BM4306 that came with my HP zv6000. That's not a failure of the Linux drivers. There is a stupid soft button to enable the antenna, and no one has figured it out for this particular zv6000 subrevision. All my other wireless cards work fine in the PCMCIA/PCCARD slot.

    As I've found, if all else fails, get a wireless bridge (like a Linksys WET54G), and plug it into your ethernet port. Sticking on one extra device is a lot easier than switching to Windows. :)

  • You have the choice of Atheros, Ralink, Intel, (Score:5, Informative)

    by MrHanky ( 141717 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @08:00PM (#14544546) Homepage Journal
    Atmel and Realtek, I believe. With WLAN, you really have to check which chipset you get before buying. Avoid Broadcom, Prism54 (driver support is coming, but depends on reverse engineering). Here [linpro.no] is a page with some recommendations.

    Personally, I have an Asus WL-107 with Ralink rt2500 chipset (cardbus), which works acceptably, and a 3com with Prism54 that doesn't work. Beware of cards that change chipset from revision to revision.

  • Linux wireless card compatibility list (Score:5, Informative)

    by rincebrain ( 776480 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @08:00PM (#14544550) Homepage
    Why hasn't anyone else linked to this [passys.nl] chart which aims to be a complete list of wireless cards and what driver, if any, they're supported by under Linux?

    It's incredibly useful.

    Personally, I've had bad luck playing with the bcm43xx driver a few weeks ago, and I've loved the new version of the ipw2200 [finally the 1.0.[78] bugs are gone!] and my rt2x00 card is a nice backup.

    Also, ndiswrapper works fine, provided you use 1.8 if you're on a 64-bit system. :)
  • Kerneltrap had an informative article on this. The short summary is that wireless support on Linux sucks, and that it is partially our own problem. A quote:

    another banner year has passed, with Linux once again proving its superiority in the area of crappy wireless (WiFi) support. Linux oldsters love the current state of wireless, because it hearkens back to the heady days of Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik and Linux kernel 0.99, when getting hardware to work under Linux required either engineering knowledge or luck (
  • The chipmakers...the dogwalkers whomever...but dont ask companies
    like Novell and Redhat to spend a little bit of money to make wireless
    networking actually work on linux. Dont ask the linux community to stop
    putting in new whizbang features and get the existing features to actually
    work as they are supposed to and dont you DARE question why wireless support
    isnt part of the kernel instead of some extra add-on that gets ignored.

    The 802.11 standard has been around since 1997, the 802.11a and b standards since 199

  • This is why we need a kernel api and abi (Score:3, Informative)

    by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @08:03PM (#14544582) Journal
    Flamebait all you want from the moderators reading this belonging to the pure gnu persusian but writing closed source drivers are tough for linux.

    Blame the manufactors? Its the FCC that forces them to not give out details to hackers. Many other governments have similiar regulations on what hackers can and can not do to wireless. The government doesn't want people takign down airplanes are terrorists doing espianage on communication equipment.

    So they must stay closed source if they are an American company. Many manufactors are now using software and creating win-wlan cards to save money. Remember what happened to linux after modem makers only made software modems? Samething with winprinters that make up the majority of printers today.

    Under windows you write once and most likely the drivers will work with future versions of windows unless there is a major upgrade. That is because of NDIS and kernel and software level api's and device driver kits for windows.

    We need a consistant and stable abi's and api's for linux so hardware makers can release the drivers for linux. Also old solaris drivers work just fine under solaris10 because of consistant api's and abi's.

    I know VIA and several manufactors have requesting to Morton and Linus for this feature even though it divides then linux community.

  • Another banner year has passed, with Linux once again proving its superiority in the area of crappy wireless (WiFi) support.
    - kernel hacker Jeff Garzik [lwn.net]

  • If you haven't got your heart set on Linux... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 23, 2006 @08:05PM (#14544595)
    If you are simply using Linux because you don't like Microsoft products, you might want to have a wander into the *BSD camp and try out OpenBSD which has excellent wireless support* (see compatability list here [openbsd.org] - Belkin USB adapters are in there, but check the model number). OpenBSD is an extremely secure free operating system with most of the applications that you can find on a Linux distribution. If however it must be Linux, then try SuSE out - it may have the support you need.

    * And excellent documentation, a brilliant firewall, a wonderfully clean code base, superb ports system and super sweet line of T-Shirts! =)


  • Support is very [sf.net] good [sf.net].
  • I've found that it's entirely too much work to fsck around with drivers on every OS on each computer. Hardware bridges (often sold as "Gaming Adapters" to connect ethernet-enabled game consoles to a wireless network) kick butt. Set up the bridge once, get connectivity to every ethernet device in the room (or as far as you want to cable), and never have to mess with it again. Even saves time on windows boxen.

    Belkin low-end wireless routers can bridge to each other. Motorola makes a decent bridge at a reasona
  • KernelTrap recently reported on this: http://kerneltrap.org/node/6053 [kerneltrap.org]

  • acx111 works well (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Teach ( 29386 ) * <graham@grahammitchel l . c om> on Monday January 23, 2006 @08:09PM (#14544635) Homepage

    I had the same problem at first. I'd picked up a Netgear WG311v2 at Fry's and it took me *forever* to finally get my card working that first time. "Craig's ACX100/111 Guide for Linux" was extremely helpful if you've got hardware using this chipset. (I'd link to it, but don't want to slashdot them or anything.)

    The driver was flaky, but functional. Now I've updated to the new driver at acx100.erley.org. Again, it took quite a bit of doing to get it working the first time (documentation for the new 2.6-only driver isn't as good yet), but now that I've gotten it working it's ROCK SOLID. It Just Works.

    Well, as much as anything that required recompiling the kernel can Just Work, anyway.

    It's basically the same story as with winmodems (no hardware specs), but the Linux community is further along in reverse-engineering because it's... well, it's WiFi, damn it, and not just an easily-upgraded internal modem.

    Speaking of which, my brother can't get Linux to see his winmodem on his Compaq Presario laptop. Any pointers?

    • Re:acx111 works well (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Bralkein ( 685733 )
      For what it's worth, the TI ACX100/111 driver is included in Andrew Morton's patchset [kernel.org]. If I remember correctly, many distributions have kernel packages available with this patchset already applied, so give that a go if you can find it.

      The driver needs to be able to load a firmware image when the module is loaded. It sounds a bit complicated perhaps, but it should just be a matter of putting a file in the right directory and it will all be handled automatically from there onwards. Information about that a

  • There's this nifty thing called Google... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Old Man Kensey ( 5209 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @08:11PM (#14544641) Homepage
    ...I hear people use it to search the web and find information, like the aforementioned ndiswrapper, ipw2200, rt2x00... madwifi, others...

    That said, the state of Linux wireless networking today is similar to where its wired networking was say six or seven years ago -- a few solid drivers, a bunch of drivers that sorta work, and a bunch of drivers with promise but very experimental. When I bought a wireless card I took care to get one that I could find Linux native drivers for, an MSI US54G based on the Ralink RT2500 USB (RT2570) chipset. (The Ralink drivers are the basis of the rt2x00 project, which claims that the next-generation unified driver will do everything and make your coffee too, but last fall it was just getting to the point where you could associate to an AP). The situation is complicated by the fact that different versions of the same model card from the same manufacturer may have completely different chipsets -- not all Belkin F5D7050 adapters are Ralink-based like my wife's is. And even if you have the driver for the chipset, the device itself may be on a PCI ID the driver doesn't look for by default, necessitating a quick patch and recompile (I had to do this for my US54G to get the rt2570 driver to recognize it). Or the driver may not be preemption-safe, locking up your system when you up the interface unless you compile a custom version of the kernel without preemption enabled. There's a million niggly things you may run into, but most of them can be worked through or around in some way.

    As time goes on, the good experimental drivers and the existing reliable drivers will develop full feature sets, the bad experimental drivers will be left in the dustbin, and it will become more common for manufacturers to follow Ralink's lead and open-source their drivers.

    One reason for the lackluster support on many chips is that apparently US companies are bound by FCC regulations not to allow the TX power on their adapters to be boosted beyond a certain threshold, so e.g. Intel releases a Linux driver with a binary-only firmware file. If you look at the installation info for some wireless hardware (802.11a, I think) it will even say only FCC-certified installers can install the card in a host device (because of concerns about improper installation causing harmful interference). So there is a certain point beyond which manufacturers may never go and the community will have to reverse engineer if they want those drivers to be fully open-source (and said drivers may be illegal to use in the US or other places).

    And if you want security on your network, oh boy, the fun you're going to have with wpa_supplicant (assuming it supports your card at all...)

    • Actually, it's not just US companies that are bound by the FCC regulations--any company wanting to sell a device with a radio transmitter in the US must go through the FCC approval process regardless of where they're located. This goes for transmitters intended for any FCC regulated radio service even Amateur Radio where the major manufacturers must submit the models for approval.

      As for FCC Certified techs doing installations, I know of no such requirement. Now, installations must meet FCC regulations reg
  • I've recently bought a Belkin 802.11G USB adapter and was dismayed to find, after a few hours of struggling with it, that there seems to be no one who has managed to get it working under Linux

    Research before you buy.

  • Check the Hardware Compatibility List next time (Score:3, Informative)

    by b00m3rang ( 682108 ) * on Monday January 23, 2006 @08:18PM (#14544710)
    Every OS has them available freely, it would be a good idea to doublecheck before making hardware purchases for ANY os (Windows excluded).

  • Ndiswrapper works great on belkin 802.11g card (Score:3, Informative)

    by CallMeeStoopEd ( 948706 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @08:23PM (#14544747)
    I have a Belkin 802.11g usb card based on the rt2500 chipset. It works great with the ndiswrapper kernel module. Make sure to follow the directions in the README/INSTALL files. Different versions of ndiswrapper work to varying degrees. I use ndiswrapper-1.1rc1 for the rt2500 Belkin adapter and ndiswrapper-0.10 for the builtin Broadcom adapter on my laptop. It sucks having to use different versions for the different cards, but I just set up a script to change things for me and it pretty much just works. Linux' support for hardware can be hard to set up initially, but once you get it working it usually continues to work (unlike a certain proprietary OS that fails every time the Wind-blows).
  • The network developers have recognised that this is a major problem at present. One of the big problems was that nobody was in charge in effect of wireless! (although Jeff Garzik has done a wonderful job of overall networking devices). John Linville has now taken on the job of sorting this mess out. (http://lwn.net/Articles/167272/ [lwn.net] http://lwn.net/Articles/167270/ [lwn.net]).

    Subsequent to this discussion there has been a lot of positive discussion on the netdev mailing list and here are some updates:
    * Public git tree has opened now
    * WPA patches are getting merged
    * Other drivers are getting merged into kernel
    * OSDL is having a summit to get together the key players (http://developer.osdl.org/shemminger/blog/?p=29 [osdl.org])

    I would say the picture in six months to a year will be dramatically better.

    If you want to contribute then google the netdev mailing list and jump on in. We would certainly appreciate help!!!

  • 2 Major problems (Score:3, Insightful)

    by HankB ( 721727 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:48PM (#14545323)
    1 - Many manufacturers switch chip sets without switching card model names. You can check the compatibility list, buy a supported card and find out when you plug it in that it is not supported.

    2 - If you buy a laptop with built in WiFi, you're stuck with the chip that the manufacturer selected. You can hope to get it working with something like ndiswrapper, but that doesn't always work.

    I've had mixed results. First cards I bought were Orinoco 802.11b silver cards and they worked pretty much on the first try after I found the wlan drivers. Likewise with the Intel wireless built into my Thinkpad T30. Up until the latest Windows driver download (2 days ago) the wireless on my Thinkpad worked better under Linux than Windows XP.

    Then I bought a card that was supposed to have a Prism chip but turned out to have a Realtek chip. They provided support for 2.4.20 and 2.6.? for Redhat. I got the 2.4.20 version working with Debian and became bound to that kernel rev. As linux kernel versions came and went, the vendor never updated their driver. I also found an Atheros based chip that worked just great with the Madwifi drivers.

    My most recent laptop is an AMD Turion from HP. I was not able to get the built in Broadcom WiFi until ver 1.5 of ndiswrapper was released.

  • No, DON'T use ndiswrapper (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Eil ( 82413 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @09:58PM (#14545382) Homepage Journal
    For the love of Dog, don't just go out and buy any old crappy wireless card and hope that linuxant or ndiswrapper will support it. All of these slashbots who recommend this route are just remorseful that they didn't do their research before wasting their money on a monopoly-sustaining wireless card.

    The worst part is that ndiswrapper and linuxant usually don't allow full use of the card. Sure, you can probably get some connectivity out of it, but sometimes you can't use 802.11g, put the card into promiscuous mode, or use one of the fancy wifi signal-strength and network information applets in KDE and GNOME.

    When people ask me about Linux wireless support, I tell them two things:

    1) Skip on down to Staples and pick up a Netgear WG511T [netgear.com]. It'll cost $40-$50 depending on where in the nation you buy it and what rebates they have going at the time.

    2) Boot your favorite distro and install the MadWifi [madwifi.org] drivers. Configure ath0 for DHCP, sit within range of an access point, and you're good to go.

    The madwifi drivers work with Atheros [atheros.com] chipsets and evidently Atheros themselves contributed a large amount of the code, so it would be in the interest of all Linux users to support them by checking out the MadWifi compatibility listing [madwifi.org] and purchasing one of the listed cards. You'll be helping the open source community and getting the most out of your wireless card at the same time.
    • Madwifi drivers aren't fully open. They have a binary only 'HAL' that does the real work internally.

      If atheros disappear overnight, the next time the kernel undergoes a significant change, you've lost support for your card.

      Same goes if you want to run it on some sort of exotic architecture.

  • $state = confusing * 10; (Score:3, Informative)

    by nathanh ( 1214 ) on Monday January 23, 2006 @10:07PM (#14545419) Homepage

    The problem I have with the state of WLAN is that there are so many competing projects. It's a real minefield for the noob who just wants their card to work.

    The majority of cards are now softmac rather than fullmac, so you need an 802.11 stack in addition to the chipset specific driver. Rather than have one stack we seem to have a half dozen: the sipsolutions stack, the dscape stack, the madwifi stack, etc. All of them have bugs and all of them are configured slightly differently.

    Features like WPA require an interface between wpa_supplicant and the driver, and once again there are a half dozen variants. There's the wext interface, the ng interface, the madwifi interface, the dscape interface, etc. The ng deserves special mention because you can't even use iwconfig to set some parameters, it's that different.

    Most cards have a binary firmware that needs to be uploaded once after every cold boot and getting those firmwares is itself an exercise in complexity. There are a half dozen tools to extract firmwares, copyright prevents the firwmares from being included with the Linux drivers, etc.

    On top of all this, every distro has their own way of configuring the special options required for wifi. None of the distros seem to support WPA in their GUI configurators, so you need to drop to the command line to configure WPA supplicant, and then you find the distros all do it differently. The NetworkManager utility which promises to make this all easy doesn't even support WPA (though it will Real Soon Now).

    The state of WLAN on Linux probably won't improve until all the drivers support WEXT, there's a standardised "fwcutter" like tool that knows how to extract every firmware for every supported wifi card, there's decent WPA support in at least one distro, and there's a single goddamn softmac stack.

  • Edimax EW-7108PCg native driver including WPA (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Colin Smith ( 2679 ) on Tuesday January 24, 2006 @08:46AM (#14547551)
    It's a Ralink chipset card. I'm using it at right this second and it's been absolutely great including WPA encryption. Cheap card, runs at 54mbps here.

     

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