[ale] IBM & Centrino wifi: no support

[Dow Hurst]

Yes, I am sorry you've discovered this after your purchase as a straight 
P4 or AMD laptop might have worked out hardwarewise a little better.  
You can have Emperor Linux retrofit your kernel with theirs.  Their 
specialty is the software configuration to make all the hardware work.  
Their solution is that they work out a relationship with the vendor so 
that their laptop will have hardware that is compatible with Linux.  The 
Dell i8500 we got from Dell came with builtin wireless that has the same 
problem you've got.  Emperor Linux gets their i8500 from Dell without 
that wireless and adds an internal wireless mini-PCI card that is 
Orinoco compatible.  So the extra money is actually saving you a bunch 
of time and work getting the hardware functioning.  They had the 
firewire, ethernet, wireless, and PC-tel modem all working when I got 
the laptop back from them.  (I paid for the retrofit to save a ton of 
problems I would have had to deal with)

The Centrino and current software based wireless chips that aren't open 
source and aren't supported are a real problem right now.  We need a 
large team of experts hacking those chips so that all these laptops can 
be made to work.
Dow


David S. Jackson wrote:

>I've been researching which bits of my new t40 are supported and
>which are not.  The centrino wifi appears *not* to be, and specs
>don't appear to be forthcoming.  
>
>There's a fascinating thread about this linux-thinkpad.org:
>
>http://mailman.linux-thinkpad.org/pipermail/linux-thinkpad/2003-August/012424.html
>
>Later in the thread some folks discuss why internal wifi specs
>can't be released due to the FCC's insistence.  I guess the newer
>generation of wifi devices do all the controlling in software, so
>releasing the specs could enable someone to make the device
>interfere with devices outside the allocated frequency range, a
>very big no-no as far as the FCC is concerned.  
>
>The wind up is that if I keep the T-40, I can't use the centrino
>wifi or the Winmodem.  And the suspend/resume apparently would
>need a fat32 partition to work under Linux.  Some challenges lie
>ahead if I want to use all of the T-40 under Linux as is...
>
>On to more researching...
>
>  
>

-- 
__________________________________________________________
Dow Hurst                  Office: 770-499-3428           
Systems Support Specialist    Fax: 770-423-6744           
1000 Chastain Rd. Bldg. 12                                
Chemistry Department SC428  Email:   dhurst at kennesaw.edu  
Kennesaw State University         Dow.Hurst at mindspring.com
Kennesaw, GA 30144                                        
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