[clue-cert] wireless 54Mbit cards info

[Ski Dawg]

Jef,

I couldn't find you e-mail address, so I am sending this here. It is the
message that I was telling you about for the wireless G cards. I haven't
checked any of it out yet, but it seems promising at first read.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
> Not specifically related to CentOS, but .11g in general; basically it's 
> not as nice as it was in the .11b era. Due to whatever random factors 
> (I've heard FCC involvement regarding the ability to tweak the wattage), 
> it's increasingly harder to find a complete open source supported .11g 
> chipset.
> 
> For instance, Proxim/Orinoco - long known as one of the best .11b cards 
> - moved to using an Atheros chipset inside, who in turn refuses to 
> release the specs (sorta - NDA stuff), which in turn leads to a binary 
> "chunk" (the HAL) as part of the driver. This is causing the driver 
> world a long time to get good, stable drivers for .11g (see 
> madwifi.sf.net regarding this Atheros thing).
> 
> Recently a comrade turned me on to "RALink" chipset cards 
> (http://www.ralinktech.com.tw/), who are very open source friendly - not 
> only do they release fully GPL drivers, but they also help the open 
> source project (rt2400.sf.net) and link directly to that from their 
> driver page. As such, I bought a $35 Asus WL-107 pcmcia card 
> (mobileplanet.com) using the ralink chipset, and am trying to help the 
> project with my Fedora Core 3 laptop. See the project page for more.
> 
> So, in summary you need to research the actual chipsets used in the 
> target cards, then go looking at the driver situation (whether it be 
> Atheros, Prism2, RALink, etc) -- in 2 years I'm sure they'll be stable, 
> but for right now the .11g world is a bit of a guessing game.

--
Doug

Registered Linux User #285548 (http://counter.li.org)
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Random Thought:
Is this really happening?