Linux hackers tackle WiFi hassles

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The King
From Linux watch:
When it comes to troublesome Linux peripherals, WiFi takes the cake. Sparked by the Portland Project's efforts to bring standardization to the Linux desktop, the Linux wireless developer community tackled this problem at its second Linux Wireless Summit last month in London.

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The Summit was scheduled as a followup to the January IEEE 802 standards committee meeting, which, among other issues, moved a step closer to making 802.11n a real IEEE standard. As a result of this timing, participants at the Linux WiFi meeting included kernel developers and vendor representatives from Intel, Broadcom, Devicescape, MontaVista, and Nokia.

Once there, according to Stephen Hemminger, Linux Wireless Summit co-coordinator and a Linux software developer at the Linux Foundation, the attendees had a very productive meeting.

Still, it's been slow going in some critical areas of Linux and WiFi, according to John Linville, the Linux wireless software maintainer. In particular, Linville reported that development work is proceeding too slowly on a new 802.11 stack (d80211); and with a new WiFi API (cfg80211), "development is even slower." Hemminger described the cfg80211 as "a good start but there are no user interface tools (the iproute2 equivalent of iwconfig)."
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I hope something good turns out from this. I'm more experienced, but sometimes I have trouble with wireless as well. The biggest problem is drivers. Also, do you use wpa_supplicant, networkmanager, or just plain iwconfig to configure your network? Standardisation would be good.
 
Yeah, WiFi is a weak spot in Linux for sure. There are some things about it that work well, but it's never as simple and elegant as other things; it feels more like a cheap hack on some level. That said, my mom's used wireless on her Linux laptop for a long time with not one problem. Granted, I did set it up for her. But nobody ever had to touch it again once it was setup.
 
Swansen said:
oohh, i'b be careful, lol, some one might attack you for that statement.
Click to expand...

Well, from a hardware manufacturer's point of view, the less variations they have to put out for drivers for different devices, the better. Additionally, having a unified model isn't a bad thing. Linux is very modular in the packages that can be installed at the choice of the user. Without some common ground between various distro's, Linux doesn't stand a good chance of overtaking Windows. Companies don't want to have to make a separate driver for Debian, Suse, Mandriva, MEPIS, Arch, Gentoo, Slackware, etc.

The first real curveball these companies have gotten in a long time from Microsoft has been with Vista---although it's not like they didn't know it was coming. Microsoft went to one code: the NT 5.x.

Not only is it good for companies, but consumers too, since they don't have to wait as long with a company developing around one set of code per OS, let alone distro.
 
Well, actually, they only have to make drivers for one thing: the kernel. All Linux distros use the Linux kernel and its modules. Their default configuration of said kernel may vary slightly depending on the primary goals of each distribution, but they all use the Linux kernel. That's what makes them "Linux" in the first place. :) So to summate, once they've written the drivers to work with the Linux kernel, all distros will pick up compatibility for that hardware.
 
True. I'm starting to digress into the aesthetics of installation...which is probably going to be where the LDN will help. But, yeah, native out-of-the-box support for WiFi won't hurt that OS at all.
 
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