[conspire] (forw) Re: [ILUG] SLED10 review, hmmm, wireless lan so easy>?

[Rick Moen]

So, last night I reinstalled my old iBook's Ubuntu installation with
Xubuntu (Xfce flavour) 6.06 "Dapper Drake".  As mentioned below, its
default kernel -- technically, the revision you get with your first
post-install "sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade" --
finally fixed the nagging G3 iBook suspend/resume problem.  Yay!
(Laptop usage without suspend/resume technically _works_, but really
sucks.)

G4 iBook users and other sufferers of Broadcom bcm43xx wireless chips
also have good news, in the form of kernel.org kernel v. 2.6.17's
release yesterday, including preliminary bcm43xx support (thanks to a
very impressive clean-room reverse engineering effort -- and no thanks
whatsoever to Broadcom).

----- Forwarded message from Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> -----

Date: Mon, 19 Jun 2006 09:04:10 -0700
To: ilug at linux.ie
From: Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com>
Subject: Re: [ILUG] SLED10 review, hmmm, wireless lan so easy>?

Quoting conor at discuskeeping.com (conor at discuskeeping.com):

> http://www.linuxworld.com.au/index.php/id;572131177;fp;4;fpid;2
> 
> Wireless LAN support (or lack of) is the reason I run MacOSX on my laptop.
> I refuse to use those wrappers, they really annoy me. I would prefer a  
> tainted kernel to be honest.
> 
> Might just give suse a go again. Anyone tried it?

It would have been nice if author McAllister had bothered to identify
what wireless utility provided the "convenient GUI menu" from which he 
picked his access point.  Saying "the OS did it" seems unhelpful.

Anyhow, I saw a closed beta of SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10
demonstrated by Novell, a few months ago, and was impressed at the
polished nature of the thing, despite not usually caring a lot about
such things.  (I'd entered the meeting wanting primarily to know about
nuts-and-bolts issues such as kernel hardware suport.)

If you're speaking of a G4 with Broadcom "Airport Extreme" wireless, I'm
not sure whether SLED10's kernel is new _enough_ to include the
reverse-engineered bcm43xx driver, which (FYI) entered mainline as of 
2.6.17-rc2.  You should be aware, in any event, that there are still
some problems (beta level of QA, lack of WPA support) in the bcm43xx
driver -- notwithstanding which, the driver team's progress has been
impressive.

Personally, I have a happier situation with my own iBook, because it's a
gloriously obsolete 700 MHz G3 iBook 2.2 with a "Apple Airport" Lucent
Orinoco wireless card.  I'm happy to report that Ubuntu 6.06 Dapper
Drake's 2.6.15 kernel finally makes my G3's suspend/resume work reliably,
the one significant problem that had remained on Linux.


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