Wayne Stallwood wrote:
On Fri, 2006-04-28 at 20:20 +0100, Ian bell wrote:
So to summarise, ndiswrapper is buggy and doesn't work for some people and the rt2x00 driver is buggy and doesn't work for some people
Well yes and no.
I think what Adam is saying is that one is a buggy driver that is in development and will improve with bug reports and further development.
The other is a (admittedly quite clever) hack that approximates the Windows network driver API just well enough to load Wireless network device drivers.
Whilst I agree with your sentiments, I applaud any method that allows me to use the hardware I have/want with Linux. For as long as Windows is supported first by suppliers there will be times when a native Linux driver is not available and hacks like ndiswrapper are perfectly viable until a native driver becomes available.
As for the wine argument, there are many specialist areas where Linux alternatives simply are not available. I do a lot of microcontroller programming and the IDEs and particularly the device programming tools are windows only. Most are provided free (as in cash) by the chip vendors. Some of the IDEs work under wine, some do not. Because serial port access is not yet fully supported under wine, none of the programming tools work with wine. Only one vendor, out of dozens, provides a cross platform program and that does not work on my laptop with which I use a USB/serial adpator (laptops don't have serial ports any more grrrr!) because the closed source programmer does not support USB serial ports. So.... I have an old PC which dual boots win98SE and Zenwalk, just so I can program chips and use the proprietary C compiler, its simulator and its IDE. In the meantime I am busy developing cross platform tools to replace these. You can see the results of some of this work at www.8052.com
IAn