Contributed by deanna on from the what to buy dept.
In order to find out why network chip manufacturers are so polarized in their support of free software operating systems, I made contact with company representatives at Atheros, Intel, Marvell, Atmel, Ralink, Texas Instruments, Broadcom, and Realtek. Not surprisingly, the manufacturers who shun operating system programmers also seem to be reluctant to talk to the press.
(Comments are closed)
By Anonymous Coward (195.158.177.77) on
Our company here in southern Germany sells lots of IBM gear from 1U xSeries all the way up to BladeStations and SANs. While I have not used OpenBSD's wireless functionality the same $%&! is happening with ethernet and storage chips. You can bet your behind that I will now start to bug our IBM contacts over this because IBM is moving one server model after the other from LSI over to Adaptec ServeRAID 8k (they are almost done!).
By Chas (147.154.235.52) on
I've been vaguely interested in running the Backtrack iso from remote-exploit, only to learn that Backtrack doesn't support the Ralink adapters that I buy exclusively, which seems odd.
It's a shame that the latest effort (whax integration) still runs on a Linux kernel, as OpenBSD seems to have the very best support. I wonder what would happen to remote-exploit if they just packed all the forbidden firmware into their iso.
By Daniel Hartmeier (dhartmei) daniel@benzedrine.cx on http://www.benzedrine.cx/dhartmei.html
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By Martynas Venckus (martynas) martynas@altroot.org on http://www.altroot.org/
Nice improvement.
Your SSL certificate is expired, though.
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By Daniel Hartmeier (dhartmei) daniel@benzedrine.cx on
>
> Your SSL certificate is expired, though.
Fixed, thanks for the notice!
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By Brynet (Brynet) brynet@gmail.com on
> >
> > Your SSL certificate is expired, though.
>
> Fixed, thanks for the notice!
>
Thank you for hiding registered users IP's.
By BSDaemon (BSDaemon) on
> >
> > Your SSL certificate is expired, though.
>
> Fixed, thanks for the notice!
>
Testing, sorry. Cool! No human entered text!
By BSDaemon (BSDaemon) on
> >
> > Your SSL certificate is expired, though.
>
> Fixed, thanks for the notice!
>
Weird, if I click the link beside my username, it finds stuff un-related to me, including a post by BSDaemon (who wasn't me).
By phessler (phessler) spambox@theapt.org on http://theapt.org
logged in users can mod their own responses once. is that on purpose?
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By Nate Montague (Nate) nate@my-balls.com on
>
> logged in users can mod their own responses once. is that on purpose?
It sounds like a bug rather than a feature to me.
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By phessler (phessler) spambox@theapt.org on http://theapt.org
> >
> > logged in users can mod their own responses once. is that on purpose?
>
> It sounds like a bug rather than a feature to me.
yupp.
also, if I'm registered, and I login via a different ip address, I can still mod up things I previously modded up.
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By Daniel Hartmeier (dhartmei) on
Both fixed now, thanks.
By Anonymous Coward (24.37.236.100) on
Awesome stuff! Does this mean registered users won't need to type in the human entered text?
By Chris Snell (chrissnell) on http://chrissnell.com
Also, how can we make the e-mail address null by default for comments?
thanks,
Chris
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By Ray Percival (sng) on http://undeadly.org/cgi?action=search&sort=time&query=sng
>
> Also, how can we make the e-mail address null by default for comments?
>
> thanks,
>
> Chris
Great minds. Since it was 13 just a second ago we at least know we're sub 15. :D
This could get silly.
By Sean (sean) on
By phessler (phessler) spambox@theapt.org on http://theapt.org
By johannes (131.130.1.135) on
I am just wondering - isn't Atmel an American corporation as well? Well, admittely I liked Atmel before, but now they seem even more likeable; Mr Bisset sounds very honest, sometimes even saying something like hey I don't know! That's a refreshing answer inbetween all this PR talk.
By Rich (195.137.96.220) rich@jezitski.co.uk on
Contacting your potential customers is what sales people do; the fact that they have chosen not to do so surely says much about how little they care about this issue.
I suspect that the reason wireless (rather than wired) network devices are being particularly protected in this way is because 98% of them will be used with MS Windows, and that market is already sewn-up. There is little incentive to bother chasing the last 2%. In contrast, a device that is widely used in a server machine is (I'm guessing) more likely to be supported by the manufacturer on free OS's because there's a significantly larger market.
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By Stuart Henderson (sthen) stu@spacehopper.org on
The customers of companies producing wireless chipsets are the embedded device, wireless card and computer manufacturers, buying chips in bulk.
General computer users are the customers of the card and computer manufacturers. Those are the people we have most leverage with, and these are the people who in turn have most leverage with the chipset manufacturers. The computer manufacturers are good people to complain to. For example: if you're interested in a particular laptop but won't buy it due to the choice of wireless chipset, make sure the computer manufacturer knows that this is the reason they have lost the sale. Bonus points if you have a legitimate reason to buy tens or hundreds of a particular laptop but won't due to their choice... Tell the company you chose instead why you went to them so they can see positive results from their choice.
By Josh Keister (synfin) on
The MadWifi developers seem to have been represented poorly in the article. One of the main developers has recently stated on the MadWifi mailing list [1] that:
"The project is evaluating both paths; that is:
* We support the effort of porting "OpenHAL" - which is based on the
Atheros driver from OpenBSD - to Linux and merging it with dadwifi. The
results are kept in the dadwifi-openhal branch for now, and will be
merged back into the dadwifi branch later, which in return will be
merged back to trunk at some time.
* We will get in contact with the SFLC, asking them for help in
evaluating the actual FCC requirements. Albeit the expected low chances
of success and in the hope that this evaluation will strengthen our
position, we will try to convince Atheros to make the sources for their
HAL freely available."
[1] http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.org.freifunk.wlannews/1684
By Michael Renzmann (86.127.185.145) mrenzmann@otaku42.de on http://madwifi.org
1. MadWifi is no company, it's a community-driven project.
2. Personally, I have not received a single mail from Jem (but maybe I and my e-mail archive both just have an horribly bad memory). And I wonder why he didn't try to get in contact with us on our mailing list if contacting us via the published addresses didn't work out for him as he claims.
Bye, Mike
By Michael Pounov (62.213.185.4) misho@openbsd-bg.org on
I`m user,programmer and administrator, who uses primary OpenBSD as a Home System from version 2.6. Because of my patience and alternatives are almost over, so I prefer an another rock-solid OS NetBSD. The Reasons:
-Pathetic Atheros support (is not worthy at all) :):):) Binary HAL works 100% solid in any mode.
-Full absence of ISDN support, ATM or other teleco stacks and drivers
-Low production performance of OS
We are developing own distribution, based on OpenBSD for any different appliances (WiFi devices,VoIP gates, VPN concentrators and others), but since 1 year took we the hard way to migrate, as basic OS for our own distribution, to NetBSD. This seems to be very expansive according money, programmer hours and troubles. Finally we`ve got a satisfying result.
And so long with OpenBSD for appliances.
"Thanks" to all blind fans, who stay behind the utopic idea for BLOB and non use of 100% solid work binary HAL or code!!!
Good Luck and many many sorry loving Puffy :-( I really love this OpenBSD OS. "Nothing personal this is only business ..."
------------------
Michael Pounov
AITNET - Software & Network Solutions
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By Anonymous Coward (70.168.131.136) on
Bye!