[3905] in Release_7.7_team
this year's IBM laptops and wireless support thereof
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (andrew m. boardman)
Wed Jul 2 22:15:19 2003
Date: Wed, 2 Jul 2003 22:15:16 -0400
Message-Id: <200307030215.WAA17358@pothole.mit.edu>
From: "andrew m. boardman" <amb@MIT.EDU>
To: release-team@MIT.EDU
This is mostly a status update, although it's conceivable that someone
wants to argue with my final conclusions.
The current generation of IBM laptops are all capable of taking one of
the same set of mini-PCI wireless cards:
- Intel Centrino: no linux support
- Atheros 5001: linux support in progress (ar5k driver), but it'll be a
while yet; there's also a proprietary driver "in development".
- cisco MPI350: cisco provides a working open-source driver with
proprietary (and very ugly) configuration tools; this should be
integrated properly into mainline kernels eventually. Also the
technically superior hardware of the lot.
For now, the word I've given Bill to send upstream is that we should
recommend none of these as currently working with Athena Linux for
wireless access ("you lose. get a pcmcia card."), but that the cisco
hardware has the brightest future. I've also written some sketchy
instructions on how to get it working under 9.2 for anyone who really
wants to hurt themselves (see /afs/dev/user/amb/mpi350/README if you're
curious), but given both the sorry state of the configuration tools and
the uncertain robustness of the driver, I don't think we want this in the
release until it turns up in the 2.4 series kernels.
