Linux Laptop

[ward at pong.be (Ward Vandewege)]

On Thu, May 04, 2006 at 10:52:39AM -0400, Jerry Feldman wrote:
> On Thursday 04 May 2006 10:32 am, Ward Vandewege wrote:
> 
> > Like I said, it depends on the exact version of the card. My colleague's
> > NX6125 is only a month or so old. How old is your NX6125?
> One month. It arrived April 5th. 

Interesting. I'll get the exact type number of my colleague's broadcom card
and post it to the list.

> > Besides; having to use ndiswrapper sucks. I'll take a GPL'd driver
> > (ralink, for instance) anytime over the (slightly unstable) resource hog
> > that ndiswrapper + windows driver is. Ndiswrapper is a _workaround_. It's
> > not a solution.

> It would be good if we could get Broadcom to release native Linux drivers. 

Absolutely. Native GPL'd drivers. In the kernel. They are being positively
*annoying*. Theo de Raadt refers to them as 'trying to lock up ethernet
again' in this interview:

  http://kerneltrap.org/node/6550

That interview is intersting actually, particularly the bit about firmware
and binary blobs. He says that it's all up to the VARs (like HP and IBM). If
they would select more free software friendly hardware... 

> I went round and round a while ago with another chip maker. 

I know you work for HP. Any chance of convincing HP to ship with, say,
ralink-based wifi cards?

> So far, I have had no problems with the 64-bit driver and ndiswrapper. 

My colleague will be interested to hear that.

Ward.

-- 
Pong.be         -(   "Bloat is not about being big. Bloat is about being   )-
Virtual hosting -( slow and stupid and not realizing that it's because of  )-
http://pong.be  -(               design mistakes." -- Linus                )-
GnuPG public key: http://gpg.dtype.org