Re: [LUG] PCLinuxOS Was: Some small linux's briefly reviewed

[Grant Sewell <dcglug@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 2008-01-16 at 10:29 +0000, Tony Sumner wrote:
> On Jan 16, 2008, Ray Smith was like:
> 
> > but has atheros chipset so not got wireless working yet.
> 
> Madwifi have a driver for this I think. I have a PCI wireless adapter
> with atheros and it works ok. 
> 
> Tony Sumner

Indeed, my Sony Vaio laptop (PCG-GRT915M) also has an Atheros chipset
A/B/G Wireless NIC and Madwifi works wonderfully.

The downside?

        "MadWifi is one of the most advanced WLAN drivers available for
        Linux today. It is stable and has an established userbase. The
        driver itself is open source but depends on the proprietary
        Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) that is available in binary
        form only."
        (take from http://madwifi.org)

Being based on a binary-only HAL, it is not up for inclusion in many
(the majority?) of Linux distros.  It is, however, usually available in
most distro's "unsupported" repository of software.

The upside?

        "ath5k is a relatively new and emerging driver and does not
        depend on the HAL. It is intended to replace MadWifi in the long
        run and exceed it feature-wise. ath5k is where most of our
        development resources are spent on now."
        (as above)

Yay!

Grant. :)


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