[NCLUG] PCI Wireless (54G) cards for purchase in Fort Collins?

[Chad Perrin]

On Wed, Sep 07, 2005 at 02:26:42PM -0600, Stephen Warren wrote:
> Chad Perrin wrote:
> > On Mon, Aug 29, 2005 at 01:35:20PM -0600, Stephen Warren wrote:
> > 
> >>Does anybody know where I can get a wireless card that is:
> >>...
> 
> It turns out that the Linksys card at the Fort Collins store (at least
> as of week or so ago) has the RT2500 chipset, which has a native Linux
> driver.

I'm glad you found one, then.  What's the model on that?  I should keep
track of where I can get cards with open-source drivers, m'self.


> 
> > First, I've gotta ask what you mean by "native driver".
> 
> Anything that doesn't run under ndiswrapper basically (ndiswrapper uses
> drivers written for Windows, which is certainly not the Linux API, hence
> the drivers are not "native" to Linux). This is pretty much the same
> thing as saying Open Source, which is the real reason I can't use
> ndiswrapper.

Gotcha.  Different people have meant different things by "native" in
past conversations and, while I was pretty sure you didn't mean anything
that'd work with ndiswrapper, I figured I wouldn't jump to conclusions
without asking.


> 
> > Second, I must ask why you specifically want a "Linux native" driver.
> > Is it only for convenience?
> 
> We're writing code to configure wireless cards, and query status,
> directly rather than through iwconfig etc. Whilst debugging this, we
> need to be able to find out why things don't work. Having closed-source
> drivers makes this practically impossible.

That's definitely a good reason to use drivers that don't require
wrappers.  Would you mind expanding a bit on how this code will be
employed?  I'm curious.

--
Chad Perrin
[ CCD CopyWrite | http://ccd.apotheon.org ]