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:
http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_Tourrilhes/Linux/Linux.Wireless.drivers.802.11ag.html