Re: ndiswrapper

["Casey Boone" <ophidian_snake@hotmail.com>]

when i bought my laptop, i knew most of the hardware was going to be 
compatable and i figured it wouldnt take long for somewhat working drivers 
to appear for the rest.  one of my old bosses has the inspiron 8300 (i 
think) with an onboard intel nic.  i just assumed that the 8500 series would 
as well.  this wasnt the case unfortunately, but it wasnt that big of a deal 
at the time because i had to be in windows for most things anyway (buggy 
software i had to use for work + ms outlook).

i still had a desktop at the time to do any linux related stuff on anyway, 
so i wasnt overly worried.

however now that i have had this beast for about 9 months, almost all of the 
hardware in it is extremely well supported.  only thiing that isnt is the 
wireless, and that seems to be decently well supported via windows drivers 
and ndis wrapper. of course i would prefer native drivers, but if they are 
anything like the native drivers for my broadcom 4401 ill pass ;}

to explain a bit...the 2.6.3 b44 driver doesnt work all that well, many ppl 
are having the same problems that i am.  the card is basically rendered 
useless until you unplug power and take out the laptop's battery anytime the 
b44.ko module loads.  if you download and install broadcom's linux driver 
(which seem to be fully gpl-ed) then the card works great.

for those at the last silug meeting this is why i jumped up and ran over to 
the lan port on the wall.  i had just finished installing and setting up 
broadcom's bcm4400.ko module.

Casey

w00t w00t my timer just went off, time to get supper out of the oven :D


>From: Tom Dison <fretinator@yahoo.com>
>You are exactly right. I always get carried away by
>price or features, and after this many years of being
>a linux user, I still forget sometimes to check
>compatability. However, I really thought the Trendnet
>wireless card would be fine since the company had a
>link to the source as well as binary drivers for
>Redhat. I guess I should have looked a little deeper
>and I would have found how bad the driver really was.
>On the other hand, sometimes I think I really like the
>challenge of getting things to work. Sometimes half
>the fun is just figuring it all out anyway. I go back
>to the early Slackware days (before 2.3 at least) when
>you had to have a boot and a root image floppy, and
>then you swapped out all these other disks (a series,
>n series, etc). If you wanted X to work, you sure
>better have the hardware specs to your video card and
>monitor. I definitely do not take for granted just how
>far installations and automatic hardware detection
>have come. But my next purchase, I will definitely be
>asking advice first. I am a die-hard laptop user, and
>they always present the biggest challengs for hardware
>support.
>
>--- Steven Pritchard <steve@silug.org> wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 30, 2004 at 05:49:18AM -0800, Tom Dison
> > wrote:
> > > The things we have to do use our favorite OS!!
> >
> > You don't have to do all of those things if you are
> > more careful about
> > what hardware you buy to begin with.  :-)
> >
> > I know the hardware howto
> > (http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Hardware-HOWTO/)
> > isn't as up-to-date as I'd like, but when in doubt,
> > feel free to email
> > the list or me directly...  I always prefer when
> > people don't have to
> > work so hard.
> >
> > Steve
> > --
> > steve@silug.org           | Southern Illinois Linux
> > Users Group
> > (618)398-7360             | See web site for meeting
> > details.
> > Steven Pritchard          | http://www.silug.org/
> >
> > -
> > To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org
> > with
> > "unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.
>
>
>=====
>Faith without Works is Dead...
>
>-
>To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
>"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.

_________________________________________________________________
FREE pop-up blocking with the new MSN Toolbar – get it now! 
http://toolbar.msn.com/go/onm00200415ave/direct/01/


-
To unsubscribe, send email to majordomo@silug.org with
"unsubscribe silug-discuss" in the body.