I'm going to provide a bit of information on what chipsets are free software
friendly and contain no non-free parts (embedded or otherwise) in most cases:
RTL8187L/RTL8187B/RTL8187 - USB G wireless Adapters
AR9271/AR9170/AR7010+AR9280 - USB N Wireless Adapters
AR9280/AR9281/AR9285/AR9287 - PCI/PCI Express Wireless N Cards (desktop and
laptop cards)
All newer Atheros chipsets are dependent on non-free firmware (All PCI/PCI
Express Cards) at this time. ath6kl which supports Atheros AR600x 802.11n
series chipsets are dependent on a non-free firmware component.
Other things to note: The chipset info in and of itself isn't really enough
to go on. It can be useful to identifying hardware that is free software
friendly. However some components may have a different ID number thats not
included in the driver and thus not compatible. Other things you can come
across are adapters/hardware where the design is based on a given chipset,
but there are significant deviations which make the kernel driver
incompatible with the hardware. In other cases there are more than one
chipset on a card and one of those chipsets depends on a non-free driver.
Don't get confused. Just because your wifi card works doesn't mean it's
totally free. In other cases you may get confused because the firmware was
loaded by your non-free MS Windows OS, Ubuntu, or similar. While the device
worked in Trisquel/Parabola GNU/Linux/etc it was only because you
accidentally loaded the non-free firmware.
Model numbers don't equal chipsets. When someone says model XYZ of something
utilizes a free chipset that doesn't make it so. What they should have said
is that at least one version of the model utilizes a free chipset. In many
instances there are dozens of different, but similar releases that use the
same model #. That means totally different driver/firmware/etc.
In many cases where a chipset is advertised the product actually contains
something else. What happened was the company which manufactured it included
the info in the advertising somewhere. That was copied to a sellers product
information page. The manufacturer then changed the chipset(s) in the product
and failed to update the site, or the seller didn't get told that the product
changed. As the model number remains the same you have no idea what your
actually getting even in cases where you think you do because the
information's been specified.
Another big thing to concern yourself with is digital restrictions in
laptops. Particularly on the Mini PCI/e slot where the wifi card goes. As an
example even if you can 'free' (and we'll be talking specifically about some
or all of the BIOS here and not other bits of non-free code found elsewhere)
a laptop your still promoting a company that enables this bad practice. Not
good. Specifically the companies that do this I'll call out here: Lenovo/IBM,
HP, Dell, Sony, Apple, and Toshiba. Don't buy from them. That's my thought on
this. There may be other issues with other companies, but at least those
companies aren't implementing digital restrictions.
One last thing about the Lenovo laptops. Not only do we know Lenovo uses
digital restrictions (and was the first to start using them) there is yet
another reason to avoid Lenovo. A member of the free software community who I
bump into regularly and know well has identified code in Lenovo laptops which
communicates (via encrypted means) information about its user. Simply
flashing libreboot is not enough to eliminate this spyware. While we don't
know exactly what information is being communicated at this time it's another
reason we should be avoiding Lenovo/IBM laptops altogether rather than
working on freeing them. Reverse engineering is a good idea in some cases.
However when it involves doing so to a line of laptops from a company that is
hindering free software adoption I feel it should be avoided. There is no
good reason in my mind for furthering entrenching said company's reputation
in the eyes of other users. A 100% free laptop which is recognizable is still
promoting a bad company. It's furthering the brand recondition and that is
bad. It's intolerable.
