On 2/1/07, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense@csclub.uwaterloo.ca> wrote:
For what it's worth, hostap + Prism chips of various kinds has worked
quite solidly for 7-8 years or so, and I shipped handheld products
with it in 2001 or so and ran all of my wireless infrastructure gear
on it until I switched to off-the-shelf Broadcom- and Atheros-based
gear a couple of years ago (running OpenWRT and variants thereof).
The apparent inability of any wireless vendor to fix a low-level
firmware bug without breaking at least one common order of operations
in the driver API is hardly Linux's fault.
As it stands, there's enough of a learning and fiddling curve with
every WiFi driver that it's usually not very time-efficient to get
WiFi working under Linux on any single box that shipped with Windows.
But given a controlled configuration and some up-front time
investment, it's not that hard to switch over your local environment
(my neighbors and I have a WDS mesh set up), at which point you may be
the only people within RF range whose WiFi doesn't go belly-up when
some mangled frame comes along. In this case, it's the last 20% of
the effort that produces 80% of the value. (Bye-bye, telco monopoly;
the only live wires remaining into our house are the AC mains.)
Cheers,
- Michael
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