On Tue, 2006-03-07 at 16:38 -0500, Dave Jones wrote:
On Tue, Mar 07, 2006 at 01:31:09PM -0800, Josh wrote:
Hello testers,
After a fresh FC5T3 install, i was configuring my USB wireless network dongle and couldn't find ndiswrapper on the FC5T3 CD.
it's deliberatly not shipped.
I may have overlooked. Is there a reason not to bundle ndiswrapper with FC5T3?
it creates a situation where if you get a kernel bug, I'm not even going to look at it, because *anything* could have happened, and as the driver is effectively binary only, there's nothing I can do about it.
it reinforces the message to hardware vendors that it's ok to not release documentation or native Linux drivers, because 'they can just use the windows driver'. This is not a 'might happen' btw, there are already companies saying this when you call them to ask for documentation.
The fact that other distros are shipping this is really sad.
Given a lot of ex-Windows users fled that platform because they were tired of crashes, I'm amazed that people now want to run the drivers from it, when a lot of the time, they were the cause of the problems.
I know it sucks to have hardware that you can't use. I've got a similar device myself that doesn't work right now. But there's hope that at some point the bcm43xx driver will work with it. Testing, and providing feedback to developers of *native* drivers is the direction we want to be headed toward.
I currently have a laptop with a Linksys pcmcia wifi card that as far as I know doesn't have a native Linux driver, so I use ndiswrapper on Ubuntu on that machine.
I would really like to install FC5 and native wifi support on that computer. Where can I find an authoritative list of "802.11g" pcmcia cards that are supported by native Linux drivers? I am more than willing to scrap the Linksys card and buy a new one if I _know_ it will work.
Thanks. Gerry