Re: Ralink RT2500 54g wireless for inclusion?
Nick Hill a écrit :
I understand Ralink are the only vendor to have a 54g wireless chipset
which does not require the host to upload (non-free) firmware.
Ralink have also released software and interface specs, and released a
driver under the GPL.
The Ralink RT2500 kernel module is included by default with the kernel
released in Ubuntu 5.10.
This appears to be the only 54g chipset Debian could currently support
'out of the box'.
Given that the ralink seem particularly free software friendly, the
chipset is cheap and common, and the driver is widely understood to work
well, are there any good reasons not to include the driver module with
the standard debian kernel?
Well, there is already a debian package that includes the rt2500
sources. This driver works pretty well and is in GPL, but does not
respect kernel standards (code organisation, private ioctl, access to
the filesystem from the module, ...), so it will never be merged in the
kernel.
However, some cool guys are developping a new driver from scratch with
some help from ralink. See http://rt2400.sourceforge.net . This driver
is called rt2x00 as it supports rt2400, rt2500, rt2560 and rt2600 chips.
This driver is coded cleanly, but still does not work very well. However
the netdev kernel guys already said they will accept this driver
directly in the kernel when it will be working correctly.
Giving the speed at which the rt2x00 driver is developped, I am pretty
sure the driver will be merged in the kernel before the etch release.
Bye,
Aurelien
--
.''`. Aurelien Jarno | GPG: 1024D/F1BCDB73
: :' : Debian developer | Electrical Engineer
`. `' aurel32@debian.org | aurelien@aurel32.net
`- people.debian.org/~aurel32 | www.aurel32.net
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