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Outdoor WiFi router runs x86 Debian Linux (LinuxDevices)Outdoor WiFi router runs x86 Debian Linux (LinuxDevices)Posted Feb 9, 2006 15:26 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989)Parent article: Outdoor WiFi router runs x86 Debian Linux (LinuxDevices)
Why are there several router products running GNU/Linux, yet such a lack of client interfaces with FOSS drivers, in either PCI or USB flavors?
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Outdoor WiFi router runs x86 Debian Linux (LinuxDevices) Posted Feb 9, 2006 15:45 UTC (Thu) by CyberDog (guest, #29668) [Link] Why do so many web servers run Linux/Unix, yet so many clients run Windows?
Answer: the two aren't related. :) Linux is logical for access points for much of the same reasons that it's logical for servers...price, power, customization, size, etc. I really don't think you'll find too many access points running Windows...
Client interfaces, on the other hand, are a matter of what's profitable in the desktop/laptop market, and as usual Linux is not in the same tier as Windows.
Outdoor WiFi router runs x86 Debian Linux (LinuxDevices) Posted Feb 10, 2006 22:13 UTC (Fri) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link] Maybe what Smitty meant was at the driver level: these routers have
the
same chipsets that you find in network cards, and they are running Linux.
Just my 2 centavos...
Outdoor WiFi router runs x86 Debian Linux (LinuxDevices) Posted Feb 13, 2006 2:56 UTC (Mon) by tjw.org (guest, #20716) [Link] Yet, drivers are sometimes difficult to find in the Open World, even closed ones (the Broadcom chipset comes to mind). I think this problem stems from the fact that the intial 802.11g chipset offerings (e.g. Broadcom's) were very closed. The reasoning was that since the radio hardware in these devices was so configurable with software that it could be used to tamper with non 802.11 radio frequencies or some such. More recently, other chipsets have been introduced that support open drivers (e.g. Intrasil's Prism). I think even the closed chipsets are slowly gaining Linux functionality through reverse engineering, but these drivers aren't very stable and most people use the win32 drivers with NDISWrapper still.
More info:
Outdoor WiFi router runs x86 Debian Linux (LinuxDevices) Posted Feb 16, 2006 17:41 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link] There are open drivers. The Ralink chipsets are all supported (with two sets of drivers in fact - the rt2x00 set which should support everything but is still very beta and the older rt2400(11b), rt2500(11g) and rt2570 (USB 11g) drivers), widely available and cheap. They haven't quite made it to the mailine kernel yet though (or if they have, only recently) so you may have to faff a bit to build a module. I have USB and PCMCIA ralink cards, and think these people deserve support for being FOSS-friendly. Devices containing these chipsets are listed here, along with links to driver sources etc: http://ralink.rapla.net/ Debian users can just install the rt2500 package and use module-assistant to get build and install the modules. My experience about a month ago was that this all worked beautifully for the PCMCIA cards, but you needed to have a kernel 2.6.14 or later and latest driver code for the USB devices.
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