VectorLinux Review [LWN.net]

VectorLinux Review

Posted May 21, 2007 22:33 UTC (Mon) by salimma (subscriber, #34460)
In reply to: VectorLinux Review by pr1268
Parent article: VectorLinux SOHO: A better Slackware than Slackware (Linux.com)

FWIW, before my bcm4318-equipped laptop died, I've never been able to get it working with the in-kernel bcm43xx driver (on x86_64, so it might work on i386). With earlier kernels, the driver would freeze the kernel when loaded, with later kernels it is more stable, but while it would show the APs it would fail to associate with one.

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bcm43xx woes

Posted May 21, 2007 22:53 UTC (Mon) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]

I stand corrected. It's a shame that the Broadcom 43xx chipset gives Linux users so much frustration so as to force users to resort to NDISWrapper (not meant to impugn the hard work the NDISWrapper developers have put into that project). Curiously, I've never experienced the issues the above two posters have (I used a Linksys WPG54G ver. 3 firmware PCMCIA card), but after I physically broke the card, I had to revert to an old (but reliable) 802.11b card.

Yeah, yeah, I know, no one's forcing anyone to use Linux; <snide-comment>we all could use Microsoft Windows instead (and have a perfectly-functioning Wifi card driver). Ballmer loves this kind of arrangement!</snide-comment>

bcm43xx woes

Posted May 23, 2007 5:10 UTC (Wed) by salimma (subscriber, #34460) [Link]

Right now the only wireless chipset I'd recommend is Intel's. Even Atheros, which has an entire project (well, two: FreeBSD has its own project) dedicated to developing open-source drivers, has had communication problems in the past, with apparently only one developer having NDA access to documentations.

The 802.11 a/b/g/n chip found in the Core 2 Macbooks (and Pro) and the T/Z 60 Lenovo Thinkpads, for example, only started working with the trunk development version of Atheros last month, IIRC. Half a year or so after the hardware is out.