Wireless: the new barrier for desktop Linux

[fouldragon at aol.com]

>FWIW, open specs from chip makers USED TO be the norm, and was that way
>for a looong time. It's only in the last several years that they've
>started keeping specs secret. I'll leave it to you to imagine why that
>change occurred, and who's interests are served by it, and how
>individual developers signing NDAs plays into that scheme, and how 
using
>ndis_wrapper as a consumer helps the vendors justify it...

I always assumed it was mostly about "the more we can offload to 
software, the cheaper and shoddier the hardware we can make... after 
all, we can always ship new drivers, but nobody wants to solder on 
extra parts to their cards."  I don't think Microsoft was financing the 
development of winmodems and winprinters.   I suppose they might have 
also figured the ability to enhance software later would let them sell 
the same kit as different later-- I wonder if there's much difference 
physically between a 14.4 winmodem and a 56k one.

Outside of drivers, which can be avoided by picking the right card 
(hey, the rt61 drivers DID do something, although it falls into the 
"rattling on a locked door" category), I suspect the real gap is in 
handling WPA.  In Windows, wether you're using the pack-in 
configuration utilities or vendor-supplied ones, there's a single 
interface which lets you configure the card from the same facilities, 
wether the network is open, WEP, or WPA.  Indeed with the XP and Vista 
pack-in tools,, the user usually doesn't even have to know if the 
network uses WEP or WPA, just the key.  It seems like the 
"conventional" setup for Linux does open and WEP, but WPA is handled 
through an entire second set of utilities, and the two aren't seamless. 
 For obvious reasons, I have no desire to downgrade from WPA to WEP.


--
Darrin Chandler            |  Phoenix BSD User Group  |  MetaBUG
dwchandler at stilyagin.com   |  http://phxbug.org/      |  
http://metabug.org/
http://www.stilyagin.com/  |  Daemons in the Desert   |  Global BUG 
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