[PLUG] Inexpensive Netgear WG511T Atheros cards at Frys

[Russell Senior]

>>>>> "Carla" == Carla Schroder <carla at bratgrrl.com> writes:

Carla> Atheros-based WICs are great. The newer ones support a/b/g,
Carla> WPA2, and can be used either on the client side or in access
Carla> points. Atheros opened up their drivers (MadWiFi) a few years
Carla> ago, so they are solid and feature-ful. They are dual-licensed,
Carla> both GPL and BSD.

Just to rain slightly on your parade, MadWifi drivers leave much to be
desired.  That said, they work, generally.  They are not particularly
"opened up" however.  The current MadWifi drivers rely heavily on a
binary-only HAL, which is kinda-sorta-not-different than binary-blob
firmware except that it runs on your CPU instead of on the card.
Loading Madwifi taints your kernel.  Atheros is apparently not
especially communicative with developers these days, and the currently
available developers are kinda-sorta Not That Competent.  They try.  I
have found that they are particularly not interested in solving
documented configurations (admittedly not the Common Case, but an
important one for us at PTP) on which it is pretty easy to trigger
kernel panics.  Way too easy.  Because of the HAL, it becomes
difficult to fix.  There is some outside work on a branch using the
devicescape 802.11 stack (in place of the net80211 stack ported from
BSD-land that stock MadWifi uses) and also on integrating an OpenHAL.
I haven't tried any of that work yet.  I think you could say it was a
work-in-progress.

Featureful?  Yes.  Solid?  Not so much.

Carla> Both the Atheros web site and madwifi.org have tables that list
Carla> brand names and model numbers of WICs that use Atheros
Carla> chipsets.

Carla> Ralink and Realtek are supposed to be fairly Linux-friendly,
Carla> and Intel keeps making 'we luv Linux' sounds, but so far
Carla> there's not much to show for all that lovin'.

For client-mode, Intel hardware apparently works pretty well.  At
least, I've heard that.  I've got one of their a/b/g radios in a test
rig, but haven't had time to play with it much.  As of 6 months ago,
it was pretty close to impossible to find intel radios retail.  Were
only available as pulls from centrino laptops.  There has been some
work on master-mode on Intel hardware, but my attempts to get it
working have been thwarted so far.  Attempts to ping the developer at
Intel have gone without reply.


-- 
Russell Senior, Secretary
russell at personaltelco.net