I have no idea if this is just coincidence, but a day after commenting about not discerning much progress from Ivo van Doorn in merging an rt2800 driver into the Linux kernel, he committed a new (albeit broken) one. Queue eerie music.
P.S. A public thanks to Mr. van Doorn for the work.
On Wednesday, Phoronix published a piece about the Gigabyte GN-WI30N-RH, a mini PCI 802.11n draft 2.0 WiFi adapter. The article is mainly about using the card in Ubuntu via NDISwrapper. Yuck.
It wasn’t evident to a lay reader, but I have to compliment Phoronix on the relevance of this post to the open source community. Even if you have to use NDISwrapper for a while, buying this card is a great way to upgrade to 802.11n in GNU/Linux right now while ensuring “it just works” functionality in the future.
That’s because this adapter is one of the first to use a 2800 series chip from Ralink, one of the most open source–friendly WiFi chipset manufacturers. Ralink has already released 2800 series drivers under the GPL. As the article notes, those drivers aren’t in the Linux kernel yet.
While the community will get to it, I’ve been a little anxious waiting for the driver to get into the Linux kernel. Ivo van Doorn is the primary author, and I’ve been watching his git commits since he wrote in January in the rt2×00 forums that he had started working on the 2800 series. But I haven’t been able to discern much progress.
I would be remiss in writing this post without also complimenting Intel. Their 802.11n WiFi adapter, the 4965AGN, has a working, Intel-supported driver that’s in the Linux kernel.
In today’s New York Times, Circuits staff writer Jude D. Biersdorfer explains Microsoft’s XPS. Conspicuously absent from her answer is any mention of OpenDocument format. How is it that ODF can be so mature and yet so overlooked, especially given Ms. Biersdorfer’s tech literacy? I’d guess their readership is more sophisticated than most, so it’s not like Ms. Biersdorfer needs to dumb it down.
