Re: Open hardware wireless cards

On Wed, Jan 05, 2005 at 08:22:10PM +0000, Steve Hill wrote:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

On Wed, 5 Jan 2005, Luis R. Rodriguez wrote:

quoted

What I think we probably will have to do is just work torwards seeing if
we can come up with our own open wireless hardware. I know there was
a recent thread on lkml about an open video card -- anyone know where
that ended up?

This may be a silly point, but there *was* good 802.11g hardware available 
which worked well with the fully open drivers. 

Yes, that would be the Full MAC prism chipsets with the linux prism54 driver,
which I help maintain.

I presume the 
manufacturers are moving to the "softmac" design instead because (for 
them) it is cheaper.

That is correct. They have already moved to the Softmac design and
you're lucky if you can buy FullMAC chipsets in stores now.

However, the point is that the working designs are 
already there and it may be that buying the existing design which is being 
phased out is cheaper for the FOSS community than developing a whole new 
open device.

Definitely, I agree. Anyone have an idea of how much buying a wireless
chipset design may cost?

Maybe it would be possible to convince one of the manufacturers that it's 
worth their while producing the older design hardware - if there is a 
single manufacturer who is making more or less the only hardware that is 
guaranteed to work under Linux there is probably quite a market for them.

I think they made the move because of economics as you mentioned
earlier. Under the current circumstances, I find it hard to be able to
Convince Conexant, for example, to start selling FullMAC chipsets again.

AFAICT the FullMAC chipsets have reached the END OF LIFE period.

	Luis

-- 
GnuPG Key fingerprint = 113F B290 C6D2 0251 4D84  A34A 6ADD 4937 E20A 525E