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Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
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Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 4, 2008 22:46 UTC (Fri) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]
How much of that "F" does Ubuntu really deserve, given the comparative lack of Wi-fi IHV driver support for Linux? I briefly scanned the article and recognized "ndiswrapper" somewhere. Need I say more?
Not meaning to impugn on the work done by the NDISWrapper developers, but, having used it (with a Broadcom/Linksys PCMCIA card prior to 2.6.17), it's not particularly newbie-friendly. I suppose Mr. O'Reilly would find flies in the ointment for most major distros these days whenever there's proprietary Wi-fi hardware involved. Just my observation from the gallery...
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 4, 2008 22:54 UTC (Fri) by s_cargo (guest, #10473) [Link]
Oh, sure Ubuntu doesn't deserve the entire F for wireless, but neither do they deserve the entire A for applications either. Just the way it is to be a Linux distribution...
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 0:38 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
The only people that deserve a 'F' for anything is Broadcom (which I beleive is the manufacturer for the cardbus card he is trying to use with his laptop) for being the ones that have absolutely shit for Linux driver support. These guys make a crapload of money off of Linux every day. Hundreds of thousands of their devices are sold and used in every possible embedded wireless devices imaginable.. network NAS, routers, etc etc. The vast majority of which run Linux. They have Linux drivers for years, for multiple platforms. So on and so forth. Yet what has teh Linux developers gotten back from Broadcom for the millions of dollars they make off of supporting Linux with proprietary drivers and selling devices destined for Linux-based systems? No source code, no documentation, no assisting developers that make their devices work in Linux. Nothing. Nada. Zilch. Nothing that I am aware of. Just EULAs and NDAs for people who buy their proprietary drivers and binary blobs that Linux devs have to reverse engineer with a 'chinese wall' method. Then people who make the mistake of choosing 'Dell Wireless' or purchasing a broadcom device have nothing but heartache and irritation when they try to make their laptops or desktops work with Linux and wireless. And, ironicly, the very devices, the cheap access points, they are trying to connect too are probably running very similar chipsets made by broadcom and more then likely are running Linux themselves! Such a waste. Every single person who has ever had trouble getting these sort of devices working on Linux should be writing angry letters and making phone calls back to the original manufactures (linksys, dlink, dell, etc) informing them that under no uncertain terms that they consider the lack of Linux support a defect in their product. There are inexpensive and high quality chipsets from other companies (ralink or intel, for example) with much better track records and open source drivers that these manufacturers can (and do, for many models) use in their stuff. I understand that due to choices in the Linux development model there are issues with getting very new hardware to work for normal people, so it would be forgivable if a manufacture won't have their device supported in a easy way with Ubuntu 7.10 or whatever, but _dammit_ broadcom does not even try.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 1:27 UTC (Sat) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]
Indirectly, you and I are arguing on the same side. My original post was partly inspired at how (1) Linux distros in general get judged (unfairly) for their lack of wireless driver support, and (2) Ubuntu is usually the "headline act" in this criticism due to its immense popularity as a Linux distro.
I agree wholeheartedly that the Wi-fi makers do too little to even acknowledge that Linux even exists.... Their claims of encryption export restrictions (or whatever it is) seem like lazy excuses.
Defending my own use of Broadcom/NDISWrapper - it was in autumn 2005 when I bought the card for a decrepit used IBM T23. I was naïve about who made the chipset for Linksys' cards, and they on sale. NDISWrapper was my only choice until the bcm43x driver stabilized. I've since migrated to an Intel 2100 chipset.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 2:59 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
Well absolutely. I have no problem with people trying to get stuff working. None at all. I fell into the broadcom trap myself when I purchased a Apple Ibook. I knew that the 'Apple Airport' was prism device and worked fine under Debian, but I didn't realise (well I had a inkling, but I didn't understand it all) that the 'Apple Airport Extreme' stuff was a entirely different beast. Since it was PowerPC then ndiswrapper wasn't even a option. It was very painful and I applaud the efforts of people getting those broadcom devices working on Linux using native drivers. And I've helped people in the past with ndiswrapper issues and broadcom devices on a few different occasions. It's not the user's fault that they purchased a peice of hardware to be used with Windows then later on wanted to use Linux only to find out it was poorly supported. And for people purposely looking for devices to use with Linux lots of OEMs make it very difficult. They do things like have XXXXXv1 being one device and XXXXXv1.1 being something completely different. I've gone to stores looking for wifi devices and have seen no less then THREE different revisions of wifi devices from the same manufacturer with the same name, same box art, same feature set, same shelf, same price, no revision number on the box, but have completely different chipsets. The only way I could tell the stupid things apart was to open the box up look for any company names and the fact I found pictures of cards and with discriptions chipsets online previous to going to the store. This is more then most people can ever be expected to deal with. Linux plus the consumer hardware market, especially with Wifi, sometimes is just a comedy of errors.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 19:06 UTC (Sat) by jwb (subscriber, #15467) [Link]
I wonder how long it will be before the standard Linux WiFi hardware is the Marvell 88W8388, used in the OLPC laptop. It's an amazing piece of hardware, consisting of an entire SoC in addition to the radio. Really it's more like having a WiFi bridge than a classic WiFi "card". And, of course, it works perfectly in Linux :-)
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 4, 2008 22:50 UTC (Fri) by jordanb (subscriber, #45668) [Link]
Is anyone else sick of these stories? Cause I sure am. Same with "year of the linux desktop" stories.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 4, 2008 23:12 UTC (Fri) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link]
Sometimes such stories are useful. They show how expectations of the new users measure against the reality. Based on their experience with other systems, and perhaps on what they read about Linux and Ubuntu so far, users expect better hardware support, but don't expect good application software included with the distribution.I think users are correct to expect better hardware support, especially better networking hardware support. Having heard of Linux as a system that excels in server rooms and that powers many embedded devices, it may come as a shock that some cheap wireless card needs Windows drivers to function with Linux. And when it comes to Ubuntu, users are correct to expect automatic installation of the drivers, maybe with a warning about copyright issues.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 4:24 UTC (Sat) by MattPerry (guest, #46341) [Link]
I liked the article. I've also not been able to get wireless to work properly in Ubuntu. I can connect to and use unsecured access points, but secure access points don't work. Ubuntu still has some work to do.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 5:59 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
The writer could set up his card easily enough with ndiswrapper, but then couldn't connect. His problem is network-manager which has never worked for me, has numerous bug reports filed, and I have NO idea why Ubuntu is thrusting it down people's throats. I configure it manually (with iwconfig/wpa-supplicant as the case may be, and dhclient) and it works very nicely. But you can't expect regular users to do that. wlassistant is much nicer and actually works.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 8:07 UTC (Sat) by pr1268 (subscriber, #24648) [Link]
Forgive me for playing Devil's advocate, but do you suppose the problem with those unable to get Wi-fi working using Ubuntu and Network-manager lies with missing/uninstalled firmware? I'm speaking in the general context of the "numerous bug reports" and also from my personal experience two years ago with the dreaded Linksys/Broadcom PCMCIA card and NDISWrapper.
There often exist many different Windows/Mac drivers for the same card (as I found out - there were five different Win32 drivers on the Linksys WPC54G CD-ROM!). After I figured out which specific driver I needed and had NDISWrapper installed, I was frustrated to learn I had to get another software tool (fwcutter) to extract firmware blobs from the CD.
This, of course, doesn't excuse Ubuntu for spoon-feeding its users an unreliable (as you claim) Wi-fi network manager utility.
Veering off-topic: I defend Ubuntu out of principle, and because I see it being unfairly maligned by bloggers and journalists who zoom in on easy targets of criticism (see my posts above), but I don't even use {U,Ku,Xu,Edu}buntu - I was introduced to Slackware in 2004 and I've never looked back (but that's a whole different topic!). ;-)
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 9:20 UTC (Sat) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]
Without firmware, the card wouldn't work, period. My two cards work with the commandline tools, but not with network-manager. One is a Netgear, that works only with ndiswrapper. The other is a Ralink, for which there is a company-supplied linux driver that requires a firmware blob, but I found that ndiswrapper worked better.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 17:32 UTC (Sat) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
I can't speak for the Netgear, but I have ralink gear (specifically an rt2500). The hardware seems fine enough, but the reason it won't work with NetworkManager is that the driver does not conform to the standard Linux Wireless Extensions API that NM uses to talk to network interfaces.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 18:05 UTC (Sat) by drag (subscriber, #31333) [Link]
There are two sets of drivers for ralink devices. One is the 'legacy' version that is based on the drivers open sourced by Ralink, which themselves seem to be Windows drivers ported to Linux. These have problems with non-x86 platforms and require the use of the Rultit program to configure them. These have been continously been improved over time, fixing bugs, and such, but the main focus of development have been making more Linux-like drivers. The main issue people have with those drivers in distributions like Ubuntu is that Network-manager sucks and pretty much takes over the devices. To use them you have to disable network manager and use the Rutlit program. Give me a whole 10 minutes with a machine and I can make the legacy drivers easily surpass the Ndiswapper bullshit. (hint: Get rid of the drivers supplied by Ubuntu, compile a cvs snapshot, and disable network-manager) The second version of the drivers are from the Rt2x00 project (which are the same people improving the 'legacy' drivers). These drivers are based on the mac80211 protocol stack, originally released by Dscape. These drivers are faster, most stable, and use less resources then the legacy drivers or ndiswrapper. They also support more then just x86. And they work with newer versions of Network-manager. Eventually they will be much more capable, too. Supporting advanced configurations and doing all sorts of fancy stuff. (multiple virtual wifi interfaces, hostap-style stuff, packet injection, etc) But obviously the development is focused on making these things 'just work' for the vast majority of users and uses (ie: you have a PC you want to connect to a encrypted wireless network with a USB dongle or mini-pc card.) For most of the Ralink devices, (except for the rt73 stuff, I think) they will have the mac80211-based drivers integrated into the 2.6.24 kernel. Now that this has been done it should be much much easier to bring new devices to Linux. The whole Mac80211 and related tools pretty much fixes the mistakes Linux developers made years ago with supporting wireless drivers. (treating them as simple ethernet devices that use airwaves instead of twisted pair wires, rather then a whole new class of software controlled radio devices) All in all it will be much easier to bring full-featured drivers to Linux distributions. These drivers should be simplier, support all the features that mac80211 supports, and have unified userspace tools for managing all of this stuff.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 18:47 UTC (Sat) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]
Right, I should have made clear that I was talking about the 'legacy' drivers (rt2500 in my case).
I tried rt2x00 a while back, but never got it working without crashes. Eventually I switched back to my other wireless device (a prism54 card, which had its own driver odyssey, from prism54 to islsm to p54, which works great).
I just noticed that both p54 and rt2x00 are showing up in linus' kernel tree so it appears that they will be included in 2.6.24. Meaning that all the people who currently curse at NM for not supporting their ralink devices can stop once they upgrade to 2.6.24. :)
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 11:47 UTC (Sat) by roblucid (subscriber, #48964) [Link]
If you try in forums to help these folk get b43xx cards working, the fwcutter stuff seems to be known. Some cards work, some partially work some of time and others not at all. Probably the responder, using the utility tools is right, and that bugs (or lack of options) in higher level tools, stop the naive user seeing when the underlying stuff operates.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 8:27 UTC (Sat) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
I've also had great problems getting WiFi to work with Linux using Ubuntu 7.10 - I tried three PCMCIA cards and ended up using a 3Com USB WiFi stick. The problem isn't just WiFi but ensuring that WPA can be configured as well - some cards support only WEP under Linux which is useless for real security. I wasn't using network-manager since this was with Xubuntu - I found that wicd worked fairly well, but its diagnostics on failure to connect are quite poor, and I have to boot from scratch with the WiFi stick inserted.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 17:49 UTC (Sat) by boudewijn (subscriber, #14185) [Link]
I stopped using KUbuntu on my Thinkpad X61t because it would switch off the wireless card after a few hours -- and only rebooting could make it switch on again.
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 5, 2008 22:05 UTC (Sat) by rvfh (subscriber, #31018) [Link]
In my case, when Network Manager fails to reconnect to my wireless network, the solution is 'sudo rmmod iwl4965' and 'sudo modprobe iwl4963', but yeah, something's still broken in that otherwise not so bad piece of software... Hope that might help someone...
Ubuntu Linux: Built-in apps get an "A", wireless support an "F" (CNET)
Posted Jan 10, 2008 16:03 UTC (Thu) by Cato (subscriber, #7643) [Link]
Now that I use wicd I find the standard kernel driver for zd1211 works fine. The only connectivity problems I've had turned out to be bugs in the DD-WRT Linux access points I use, where the binary 'nas' process dies, killing WDS links in the process. This is another aspect of the same problem, i.e. Broadcom using binary drivers and userspace programs on the WRT54G and similar routers. Until we get open source for everything in DD-WRT and other WiFi router distros, it's tough to debug this sort of problem.
Ubuntu 7.10 is much better than previous for wireless support
Posted Jan 8, 2008 12:44 UTC (Tue) by wawjohn (subscriber, #509) [Link]
I installed Kubuntu 7.10 on an old HP"Omnibook 4150 I have, and tried with the various wireless cards I have lying around. I was surprised to find cards and devices that were previously unsupported just work, like the TrendNet TEW-426UB USB hotspot detector/wireless adapter. I also bought a cheap Atheros based Digitus card, which works really well. Both these two devices work with WPA, all using Knetworkmanager. I even got two older cards working, one using ndiswrapper, but they could only use WEP encryption. All in all, there are significant improvements from versions 6.06 and 7.04.