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The ipw3945 projectThe ipw3945 projectPosted Mar 2, 2006 11:30 UTC (Thu) by cate (subscriber, #1359)In reply to: The ipw3945 project by eskild Parent article: The ipw3945 project
I want a open source driver. I want to see the code. I want to see what restriction apply in my country.
Anyway, the frequency and max power should be standardized. When I move abroad with my laptop, I never tell my laptop that I'm in an other nation. (I think I cannot do it).
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The ipw3945 project Posted Mar 2, 2006 11:40 UTC (Thu) by gypsumfantastic (guest, #31134) [Link] As far as I can tell, the "driver" is open source. Admittedly there is a microcode blob (not part of the kernel at all, thus not linked), and an easily-straced daemon which is non-free, but this doesn't seem especially onerous at all because;
1) The microcode blob is not part of the kernel or its device infrastructure, and is not maintained by the kernel developers. It's simply using the kernel as a piggy-back loader mechanism to get the device started. To me, it's no more or less irrelevant than the absence of source code to my PC BIOS.
2) The daemon is easily reversed-engineered, barring legal restrictions. And the legal restrictions probably aren't Intel's fault, or if they are, it's the fault of the legal department covering their asses a bit too much. But covering asses is what legal departments do.
The ipw3945 project Posted Mar 2, 2006 13:41 UTC (Thu) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] I want to see what restriction apply in my country.For that, you surely want to look at the appropriate regulations/laws, not at (possibly buggy) code, whether free or not.
The ipw3945 project Posted Mar 2, 2006 15:12 UTC (Thu) by danm628 (subscriber, #5995) [Link] There are several reasons your notebook's WiFi link works in multiple countries. The simplest reason is that most countries use the same 2.4GHz IFM band, so the odds are that your device overlaps the allowed spectrum in the country you are visiting. This is why most older devices work when in different countries. Of course there is no check that the device complies to local regulations. All countries (or most -- there may be an exception I don't know about) use the same band but they do have differences in the size of the band and the allowed transmit power levels.
Newer devices support 802.11d which allows a 802.11 STA to receive regulatory settings from a 802.11 AP. So your notebook will automatically conform to the regulatory domain defined by the AP.
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