iB::Topic::Native Drivers for Broadcom Wireless

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Topic: Native Drivers for Broadcom Wireless, any hope for 2.4.x?

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curaga

Group: Members
Posts: 2163
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: Jan. 19 2008,21:53

It happens. In fact I had a similar fight today with Gnucash.

First 15+ gnome libraries went along really smoothly. Then came the show stopper, gnome-print.
I fought with that for about 5 hours until I finally beat it. But even if I did get it to compile, I didn't get it to act nicely (fsckin autotools!). No matter what I did, libtool/auto* always removed the freetype during linking. But I was close. I could stand that, since after finishing no-one would ever compile against these.
Then, finally, gnucash. After messing with configure for 2 hours, the actual compile was error-less.

Phew. Not. The damn system seemed to do it, but it didn't work after installation. Because the build system had silently decided to not build shared libraries at all. Despite they being the only thing that keeps gnucash going. Around here I finally decided to ditch it, once and for all.

And then, 15min after rm -rf, I miraculously find the cure for the shared library problem, that was nowhere to be found during the problem. So tomorrow again.

Lessons learned: try again. And the fact I hate autotools.

Why don't you try the last ndiswrapper that supports 2.4?

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lucky13

Group: Members
Posts: 1478
Joined: Feb. 2007

Posted: Jan. 20 2008,05:41

Quote

Why don't you try the last ndiswrapper that supports 2.4?

That was one of my goals. The later (and even earlier, fwiw) versions of ndiswrapper require gcc 3.4 or higher, etc. It would require a fix of many things from the ground up just to ride out the last gasps of 2.4. I'm resigned to accepting that the time for doing that is past. I'm also convinced after the time I spent measuring my results in a similar environment this afternoon that the benefits would be marginal and uninspiring had I succeeded.

That's the problem working with a hack to get a closed-source piece of ___ ("hardware" or whatever word you think is suitable) working in an open source environment. Whether ndiswrapper is a good or bad hack is a subjective call. I have no complaints with it using what I am right now -- kernel 2.6.22.14 with WE22, WT28, and ndiswrapper 1.49. It works almost as well as in the OS for which the card was intended to work. Maybe it will get even better with more development.

It's another story in 2.4. What works well enough for some now in 2.4 is fine, but it won't get any better than it already is for *anyone* because ndiswrapper and wireless extensions developers have abandoned it.

Which gets back to the main point of my answer to your question. Why work at making a small improvement on a dead end when it'll take the same or less effort to get a *lot* more improvement with greater chance of even more progress?

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"It felt kind of like having a pitbull terrier on my rear end."
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