[ale] IBM & Centrino wifi: no support

[Christopher Fowler]

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           
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> Chemistry Department SC428  Email:   dhurst at kennesaw.edu  
> Kennesaw State University         Dow.Hurst at mindspring.com
> Kennesaw, GA 30144                                        
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