Linux gains enhanced WiFi stack

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The day when WiFi cards "just work" under Linux may be fast approaching. WiFi software stack specialist Devicescape has released its "Advanced Datapath" 802.11 driver stack to the open source community under the GPL, and the Linux kernel developer community appears to be working to adapt it for mainline inclusion.

The Devicescape WiFi stack was previously only available to device vendors, under license.

WiFi card support is currently spotty in Linux, at best. Bright spots include Intel's Pro/Wireless or "Centrino" radios, and lots of essentially obsolete, difficult-to-find cards such as those based on Prism chipsets.

Devicescape specializes in selling WiFi stacks to device vendors, and it says that Linux's poor WiFi card support is limiting Linux uptake in wireless multimedia devices. It hopes its contribution will help developers quickly adopt the latest WiFi silicon technology into their wireless product designs, without having to wait for silicon vendors to release Linux drivers.

News source: Linux Devices

#1 Aq3e on 02 May 2006 - 19:12

Amen. bout time have been lookin forward to this.

#2 Tomo on 02 May 2006 - 19:14

Thats great news, can't get my wifi working

(1 reply) #3 Windam on 02 May 2006 - 19:41

I wonder how soon is now. You think Dapper Drake will have such a thing?

#3.1 Marshalus on 02 May 2006 - 20:07

Doubt it, it'd have to make it into the kernal before then. The next major disto releases will probably have it included though.

(4 replies) #4 BigCheese on 02 May 2006 - 20:05

My Wi-fi card seemed to just work when I tried Ubuntu 5.10. Thats a lot more than can be said for windows.

#4.1 markjensen on 02 May 2006 - 21:09

That is the Linux way!

It "just works" without needing to do any extra-step driver install.

Or it works after a little bit of work. :| Or, it isn't supported and doesn't work at all.

My experiences have been overwhelmingly positive, though. But not everyone has the same fortune.

#4.2 raskren on 03 May 2006 - 01:17

I've had the opposite experience.

Very little of my network gear works with any Linux distro out of the box. Whether it be wifi, analog modem, or ethernet.

How the heck am I supposed to get a Linux driver from the web with no network connectivity? My network devices sure as hell didn't come with Linux drivers on CD. That's the "Linux way" as far as I'm concerned.

#4.3 dismuter on 03 May 2006 - 12:09

I've been using Linux a lot lately, been messing around with Xgl and AIXGL too, but hardware support just isn't what it is on Windows.

They should completely rethink the way drivers are installed. Unless the driver is in a package repository, it's very user-unfriendly. With all those different distros, which manufacturer wants to bother with .debs, .rmps, .tgz?

#4.4 Treefrog on 03 May 2006 - 13:02

The "Linux way", for me, is that I buy supported hardware. This is how I've bought hardware for the last 10+ years, from sound, video and network cards to printers and scanners. It's easy. Just see what works well, and make the purchase. Buy what works, don't just blindly make purchases hoping the stuff will work.

#5 barneyt on 02 May 2006 - 20:07

Excellent!

Barney

#6 P1R4T3 on 02 May 2006 - 20:32

Nice job Devicescape

#7 Shadrack on 02 May 2006 - 20:51

This is excellent news! I hope it works with my Linksys WGT (or something) 802.11 G pcmia card I use with my old notebook. I've never been able to get that to work, and I've tried just about everything. Been wanting to use Linux on it, but any OS w/o network connectivity is a drag!

#8 Jugalator on 02 May 2006 - 21:48

This would indeed fix up a weak spot for Linux in many cases

#9 Arckon on 02 May 2006 - 23:58

This is great news! I really wish that Creative Labs would take note of this and do something similiar instead of giving us hardly any support at all. Owners of the X-Fi card may not have support for Linux at all for many years to come

GET THE LEAD OUT CREATIVE!

#10 Toastyone on 02 May 2006 - 23:59

Yay!

it is about time you would think someone would have done this awhile back with wireless being where it is

(1 reply) #11 advancedboy on 03 May 2006 - 01:18

now all we need is ogg audio to become more popular among P2P users, so we don't have to mess with installing nasty codecs

#11.1 Z3r0 on 03 May 2006 - 13:34

i'm afraid ogg vorbis is essentially obselete, it is only comparable to mp3 in bitrates (imho), say 128/192kb/s, now look at lc-aac (low compexity advanced audio coding) files inside the mp4 container, they are subjectively comparable quality at 96/128kbps, for portables HE-AAC brings the bitrate to 80kbps for decent quality and there's HE-AAC v2 which brings us parametric stereo and perhaps very good quality at 48kbps and what about mp4 lossless?

You know even though it's not being developed anymore, FAAC and FAAD are free decoders/encoders for mp4 and also amarok 1.4 supports mp4, so does XMMS-mp4, sorry those are linux apps, winamp supports mp4 encoding/decoding, nero supports mp4 encoding/decoding and so does wmp with (coreaac?) and other directshow filters are available

Not to forget of course the mighty itunes supports m4a/mp4 as well, the shuffle players (and the normal ones too) have built in hardware support for LC-AAC

A good forum to read for more info is at http://www.hydrogenaudio.org

mp4 (with aac as audio and h.264 as video) has gone mainstream and not a lot of people have noticed

pretty funny that

#12 Jonathan2007 on 03 May 2006 - 02:16

But installing nasty codecs is really easy. Just apt-get it, or use Synaptic, or URPMI, etc. Everyone still seems to think that in Linux you have to compile everything when in reality you only have to compile packages if they are pretty rare and no one has released a .deb or .rpm.

(1 reply) #13 matt74441 on 03 May 2006 - 05:41

Good to hear. Now we need those ***** over at Broadcom to do the same.

#13.1 Havin_it on 03 May 2006 - 13:55

There are currently two solutions for Broadcom WLAN cards.

ndiswrapper
http://ndiswrapper.sf.net/
This is what I use, and is the defacto solution for cards from non-Linux-friendly cards. It provides a compatibility layer for binary Windows drivers. Unfortunately, this means it's only on x86.
bcm43xx
http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/
A new and far-from-stable effort to provide a cross-platform solution. PPC Mac users are wetting their pants over this as they can finally use their Airport Extremes under Linux. Requires either SoftMAC or Devicescape stacks patched into the kernel - so if DeviceScape is officially adopted, distro package maintainers will have a much easier time adopting bcm43xx. I found it fairly usable under Gentoo with my Belkin [Broadcom chip] card, though it doesn't yet support Ad-hoc or Master modes, so doesn't suit my needs. Still requires the binary firmware; uses a tool called fwcutter to extract the blobs it needs.

(1 reply) #14 zivan56 on 03 May 2006 - 06:26

As I stated in the forums, this article is misleading. Atheros has the best Linux wireless drivers, PERIOD.

#14.1 Martin Blank on 03 May 2006 - 18:21

Atheros doesn't release Linux drivers. They provide the binary HAL around which is built the MADWifi open-source drivers. (The binary-only HAL is also the reason that these drivers will never be included in the Linux kernel under current policy.) The MADWifi project does have a good codeset, but they are not officially connected to Atheros.

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