Well, Hallelujah and and Amen to that. Regardless, I am willing to throw the difference between a linux distribution and kernel development. I understand (atleast am informed thanks to lkml ) why the kernel developers choose their stances on driver development and inclusion/exclusion. I am also thankful that there are many side projects that provide the community with drivers that enable us to use hardware and functionality that isn't included in the kernel (I am using a MadWifi supported card right now), and sites the provide packages of these drivers ( dag, fedora.us, etc ). So what is stopping us from enabling use of this functionality, if a user installs kernel driver that supports it? Most of the driver packages,including ndiswrapper ( *cough* opensource community hates them , but they really do a great job giving people support for closed source drivers, *cough* )., support the existing wireless-tools commands. Why not provide the best usability we can using the toolset/funcationality we have.? On Thu, 16 Sep 2004 02:33:21 +0100, Jonathan Andrews <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > > I see NetworkManager as a solution to the latter of these issues. It > > gives a nice easy gui, and password/key management for the user. I > > have proposed a patch as a first stab for the first issue. If there > > is no immediate plans for moving away from the ifup/ifdown managment > > of network interfaces, I really feel that the wireless configuration > > needs to be more dynamic than the existing scripts provide us. > > > > I have to have a gentle go at the kernel people at this point - slap me > if you like :-) > > Wireless discovery in general isn't going to be easy across > distributions because for reasons purely political (as far as I can > tell???) the promisc mode was left on the cutting room floor !!! WHY > !!!! > > I would have thought that tune, and listen would be the first two things > any wireless driver would be able to do. > > I'm sick of having to patch the wlan drivers before I can run anything > other than primitive discovery tools, or sniff...... > > So how about it guys - complete the API for the wireless so good front > end tools and monitoring applications can rely on normal network > functionality as part of the base OS. So we can maybe monitor for APs in > background when traffic allows and have a truly transparent roaming ... > > Knoppix ships the patched drivers and I don't see them running scared, > so why not make the patched drivers the standard drivers and save us > users the tedium :-) > > Cheers, > Jon > >
