On Thu, 2010-01-07 at 11:17 +0000, Peter Robinson wrote: > That might well be the case but it is also the case for just about all > wireless drivers including the one used in the XO. What wireless > chipset would you recommend that has a completely open firmware that > is also widely available.
On my Lenovo X200s, I installed an Atheros AR5008 mini PCIe card, which supports 802.11n and doesn't require any firmware at all. Since all the wifi stack is implemented in software by the kernel, you also get a number of cool features, including 802.11s (mesh), AP mode and even dual-AP mode (Fonera style). As an added bonus, my OS is now 100% free of any firmware blobs. I could uninstall all the firmware packages from Fedora and everything still works perfectly. There's probably some binary code (or data) for the Intel GM45 GPU, but I didn't bother checking. As a side note, I had to reflash my BIOS with a hacked version that would not check every PCI ID against a whitelist of devices "supported" by Lenovo. My laptop also came with a complimentary TPM chip, but luckily Lenovo is not (yet) using it to block their customers from flashing an unauthorized BIOS. Don't you love DRM? :-) -- // Bernie Innocenti - http://codewiz.org/ \X/ Sugar Labs - http://sugarlabs.org/ _______________________________________________ SoaS mailing list [email protected] http://lists.sugarlabs.org/listinfo/soas
