Question about network drivers

[Mitch Golden]

On Thu, 28 Sep 2006, Michael R. Head wrote:

> On Thu, 2006-09-28 at 11:26 -0400, Mitch Golden wrote:
>> I am wondering how it will be decided what versions of wpa_supplicant,
>> ndiswrapper, and wireless-tools get included in Edgy.  The reason I am
>> asking is that I have a new Dell with a Dell 1390 and to get it all to
>> work (so I am told) is that all of these need to be more recent than what
>> was included in Dapper in order for it to work.  See eg here:
[...]

> Two suggestions:
> 1) check launchpad (or packages.ubuntu.com):
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/network-manager
> https://launchpad.net/distros/ubuntu/+source/wpasupplicant
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/wpasupplicant
> http://packages.ubuntu.com/network-manager

Thanks for the reply.  I see that the packages in Edgy are new, and should 
deal with some of the issues.

I see that the version of ndiswrapper that's included is 1.18, but this is 
10 releases behind the latest version.  My understanding of the way 
ndiswrapper works is that there are two parts of it, the module and the 
"utils".  The 1.28 package contains a driver part numbered 1.28 and a 
utils part numbered 1.8.  (I consider this a bug in the ndiswrapper 
release - in my view they should release separate tarballs.)  Anyway, 
given that the driver isn't released as an ubuntu package, shouldn't the 
numbering be 1.8?  And I am not sure how to determine what driver version 
is being included in the kernel packages.

> 2) download the latest Knot or beta release, try it out on your
> hardware, and report any bugs you find before release!

I will definitely be doing this.

   - Mitch