At the beginning of the year I gave a presentation on wireless networking in linux. I mentioned that there were two tracks of driver development. One called wireless extensions (which is the semi official nicely licensed development track, but which didn't work with the PRISM2 series of chipsets) and wlan-ng (which is a third party project that isn't included in pcmcia-cs or kernel, and uses the mozilla license, and is only for PRISM2) the problem was PRISM2 is the most popular chipset out there. Walking into Future Shop or Compusmart chances are every single card they stock is based on PRISM.
Getting wlan-ng installed is a major pain in the ass on any major distro because it requires a kernel recompile. Recently however the PRISM2 support in wireless extensions has matured (specifically it now supports crypto), and SUSE 8.1 simply works when you plug in a PRISM2 based card. This is excellent news. YAST2 even has the necessary GUI modifications to allow the cards to be configured without touching a single test config file. Note: Reason #4378 why Redhat Distributions suck: It looks as though RH8 should support this but it just doesn't work.
