I found something very disturbing yesterday when I went to attempt to get my wireless card working. I discovered that the company that acutally produces the cards for LinkSys, refuses to create a driver for linux or even release the specs so someone else can produce a driver!!! WTF? Well, after much disappointment and searching on the internet (thanks to Google), I was able to find out that you can use the windows driver and wrap them using a program called ndiswrapper.
You basically download the windows driver and point this program to the .sys and .inf files and it allows you to use a windows driver to support any 802.11g wireless card. Thank goodness for the resourcefulness of the *nix community!
After a few more issues trying to get my module loader to get everything working the way it is supposed to do, I am posting this from my laptop via the wireless card :)
Posted by doug at January 18, 2004 03:46 PMI had that problem once... with my Logitech QuickCam VC. They released the specs for all of their other cameras, but refused to release them for that specific model. I even emailed them about it. Of course that was back in the day when insanity was my primary computer and I wanted to have a webcam. Now it only gets sporadic use at work on my XP box.
Posted by: stacey at January 18, 2004 10:39 PMi bought my canon scanner because it was slick (usb power, very small, good for laptop), but then found out that it was completely unsupported.
it sat mostly useless for probably nearly a year until the cool plustek guy who does the sane drivers got it working. now it's great to have.
that ndiswrapper thing just feels *dirty*, doesn't it?
Posted by: john at January 19, 2004 09:06 AMYeah.. I must admit that I don't like the idea of using the windows drivers on my Linux box, but I really don't have a choice at this point. I could go buy a new 802.11b wireless card, but then I lose the speed and everything else associated with the "g" type cards. Bastards!
Posted by: doug at January 19, 2004 01:43 PM