VectorLinux Review

VectorLinux Review

With my old laptop (RIP *sniff* ) I had the broadcom badness. Airport Extreme flavor.

It's non-x86 so there is no way that NDISWrapper would ever work.

For a long time it would associate, but crap out when the DHCP happenned. Apparently it didn't like being taken down and brought back up quickly. So for a long time only static connections worked.

Once it got into the vanilla kernel it settled down and acted reliably. The only problem was that if it got disconnected then sometimes rmmod'ng the module and modprobe'ng it back in would be the only way to bring it back up.

As for the speed of the connection.. 11Mb/s was the default speed. For some reason it is unable to dynamicly adjust to the speed of the network.

Most of the time I actually slowed it down to 2Mb/s by using iwconfig since that would result in more reliable connections. But it had no problem operating at 54Mb/s given a good signal, I just had to manually set it.

iwconfig sta0 rate 2M
or whatever.

Keep in mind that this driver does come in two flavors. The first one, the one in the kernel currently, is the Intel 80211-based driver.

The advanced, final one, is the mac80211-based (aka dscape 802.11 stack) and is the actual goal. mac80211 should be in 2.6.22.

Other drivers are like that. My personal favorite devices are the Ralink devices and they come in two flavors also.. the regular versions then the rt2x00 mac80211 version.

So, although I don't know this for a fact, I bet those of you stuck with devices that won't work with the in-kernel driver would be smart to try out the Wireless-dev branch of the Linux kernel and let the developers know any problems you run into.

I think that one of the things that are holding these drivers back are because users are giving up to easily and resorting to ndiswrapper. I don't blame you for doing that (after all we all use computers for more then just compiling kernels), but I think that developers would probably like as many different testers on as much different hardware as possible.

That way when the drivers do end up making it into the kernel then they are tested and more then likely will work for new users to Linux with much less effort then they currently do.

http://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/linville/wirele...