[conspire] Ah, it's an Atheros-based PCI card

[Don Marti]

begin  Rick Moen quotation of Fri, Sep 02, 2005 at 02:43:43PM -0700:

> That means that madwifi suffers the long-term disadvantage of
> binary-only code of all sorts:  It cannot be debugged or maintained by
> the larger Linux community, and thus may afflict your system with 
> stealth bugs, and over time will probably cease to be usable as hardware
> and the kernel's software interfaces evolve.

A binary driver may cause kernel security upgrades to
break your networking -- binary driver compatibility
is never guaranteed.

A binary driver that doesn't support power management
correctly could cause the whole system to power-save
incorrectly, thereby contributing to global warming,
the melting of the Antarctic ice cap, and the
extinction of penguins.

> Unfortunately, the whole field is rife with people's personal
> hobbyhorses and odd perspectives, which of course they don't often 
> properly disclose.  It's generally best that you gather some opinions
> and make up your own mind.

How to pick a distribution, for hobbyists:
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/blosxom/software/hobbyist-distribution.html

-- 
Don Marti
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/
dmarti at zgp.org