Why Eee?

[Brandon Sandrowicz]

On 12/19/07, Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> As for the walmart thing, it appears it is an Acer AS5315 with a Celeron
> M 530 (can't quite find that for sure) and an intel 960GML chipset.
> Wireless is apparently atheros AR5007EG, which is not currently
> supported by linux.  Apparently someone is working on adding support to
> the madwifi atheros HAL for it, but that could take a while, and my
> experience with the atheros HAL has not been anything I would want to do
> again, so I would consider it a laptop with no wifi at all if you are
> running linux.
>

So far as I understand it a lot of Atheros chips are supported very
well.  To the point that you can even run wireless attack tools on
them (passive scanning, packet injection, etc).  And I've heard
second-hand reports that the Atheros chips are able to get better
reception than the Intel chips.  So far as I know Atheros and Intel
are the only well-supported wireless chips on Linux (I'm discounting
older 802.11b-only chips like the orinoco chips here).  The
alternative would be a broadcom chip (like Apple just did when they
released the latest update to the MacBook... used to have an Atheros
chip, now it's a broadcom with the only support being through
ndiswrapper)

--
Brandon Sandrowicz
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists