[Tfug] bcm4306 wireless

[JD Rogers]

On 5/27/06, Chad Woolley <thewoolleyman at gmail.com> wrote:
> Here's a quote from the Linux wireless maintainer at the beginning of
> the year, who admits "I'm just the defacto guy, with no interest in
> the job.":
>
> "another banner year has passed, with Linux once again proving its
> superiority in the area of crappy wireless (WiFi) support. Linux
> oldsters love the current state of wireless, because it hearkens back
> to the heady days of Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik and Linux kernel 0.99, when
> getting hardware to work under Linux required either engineering
> knowledge or luck (or both)."

Egads! Am I one of those? That's pretty funny, but makes a really
important point. I've been content because I can get my hardware to
work, but things on the wireless front haven't improved much in the
last couple years. I for one blame the chip makers. They don't even
have to spend money to make linux drivers, if they would just release
good docs and specs so developers could make quicker work of it.

> http://kerneltrap.org/node/6053
>
> Linux desktop has come a long way, but things like video and wireless
> are still archaic, and have a long way to go...
>
> -- Chad
>
>
> On 5/26/06, Paul Scott <waterhorse at ultrasw.com> wrote:
> > Brian Masur wrote:
> > > My Gateway 7422GX notebook has internal mini-PCI bcm4306.  While it works
> > > with ndiswrapper (and 64-bit windows driver) it does have some trouble.  It
> > > often switches off from whatever ESSID it was on to ESSID:NONE/OFF.  The
> > > only way I can bring it back when it does that is to rmmod/modprobe
> > > ndiswrapper.  IMO, ndiswrapper is total rubbish.
> > >
> > > I would recommend getting a better pcmcia/cardbus adapter like one with an
> > > orinoco, atheros, or prism chip, (I recommend Senao) or wait until the
> > > broadcom driver in development is usable/useful.  Yes, there is a broadcom
> > > driver but it didn't work for me last time I tried, which was at least four
> > > months ago.  Good luck!
> > >
> > Thanks.  Chris Case at Ultramedia thought he was selling me a card with
> > RaLink RT2500 which is Linux friendly but MSI apparently changed the
> > chip.  I will probably take it back.  Do you know of any inexpensive
> > Linux friendly card available locally?
> >
> > For now I will at least try to get ndiswrapper going just for
> > experience.  I also have a Linksys WPC11 ver. 4 which has a Realtek
> > RTL8180 which requires building a kernel module which I haven't needed
> > to do since I got a Lucent Winmodem going.
> >
> > Thanks again,
> >
> > Paul
> >
> >
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