First impressions with Ubuntu

[John]

Julien Olivier wrote:

> - Why don't you provide ndiswrapper packages. 
>

I do not speak for the U team.

There was a big debate about ndiswrapper on the LKML a while ago. It was 
quite heated, and went for some time.

those agin maintained that
1. It might be okay for reverse engineering, but not really anything more
2. It's crude hack and doesn't belong in the kernel
3. We don't want to encourage vendors to think Windows drivers are okay.
4. Windoes/Proprietary software tends to be buggy and we don't want it 
infesting our computers.
and so on.

I would probably use it if I had to, but I searched around and have 
found a supplier of prism54-based wireless cards. They come with a 
binary blob of firmware (I understand all Wireless cards have this) 
which has to be loaded into the card. the driver for the card is a 
standard part of 2.6.5 and later kernels (and, I imagine 2.4 from about 
the same time).

There are other 11g cards that work - dlink have some using the Atheros 
chipset, and I think there are some Intel-based cards too.