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In my previous article, I shared my opinions and overall vision of the state of Linux wireless today. In this latest installment, I will demonstrate exactly how one can have a simple way to implement Linux wireless connectivity without all of the headaches.
Assuming you have managed to find a wireless card that is working well with your Linux distribution, or perhaps you just settled for a hack-n’-hope solution with NDISWrapper, you need to settle on an application that you can use to connect to your wireless network.
So, this is a rant. Please don't quote me on this article, as my opinion might have changed a day after posting. In the meantime, there's a rant I've been meaning to write for a long time that I've put off since I'm officially wearing the KDE Marketing hat. Tonight, I take it off.
Take the licensing issue. I've been handling licensing matters for Fedora for at least a year now (maybe longer), and admittedly, the new GPL v3 makes things much more complicated.
No other hardware nowadays supports GNU/Linux as weakly as wireless network adapters. Between the constant release of new models and major vendors who are uninterested in supporting the operating system, free drivers for wireless cards are next to impossible to reverse engineer.
Wireless in Linux has finally reached a point where it’s easy to setup and use. Most distributions provide graphical applications to manage your wireless connection. Ubuntu is one of them with its simple but effective and easy to use network-admin.
Since our previous peek at the state of wireless networking in Linux, which is moving forward in an excellent fashion, the new unified Linux wireless stack (mac80211) has been accepted into the mainline 2.6.22 kernel.
"Development of OpenHAL, a wireless network component for Linux, can now resume unfettered after months of legal uncertainty. OpenHAL allows people with wireless cards based on technology from Atheros Communications, Inc. to connect to networks using solely free and open source software."
