[ale] IBM & Centrino wifi: no support
Christopher Fowler
cfowler at outpostsentinel.com
Wed Aug 13 10:22:12 EDT 2003
What was the price of the work they did?
On Wed, Aug 13, 2003 at 10:09:34AM -0400, Dow Hurst wrote:
> 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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