Linux on Acer (was: AW: [LINK] Eric Raymond on OSS UIs)

[Glen Turner]

On Sun, 2004-03-14 at 22:06, Auer, Karl James wrote:

> On the wireless front, don't give up yet. If it's a Prism chipset (and
> MANY are) the hostap drivers (http://hotap.epitest.fi/releases) will
> almost certainly work for you. Otherwise ten minutes googling should
> find you a driver or convince you there isn't one.

There's also a completed commercial project at www.linuxant.com
and a open source project called NDIS Wrapper which allow
Windows drivers (particularly those for wireless cards)
to be used under Linux.

Intel have just announced native Linux support for the Centrino
wireless chips.  But I'd give it a month before installing
it as there are bugs (but also a large group of people who
are very motivated to fix them).

What is interesting for Link is the reminder that PCs aren't
the major market for chip manufacturers.  Apparently, WLAN
is going to make its way into embedded products.  Last year
Linux became the dominant platform for new embedded systems
developments.  To compete with Broadcom, Intel needed a Linux
driver for their WLAN chips.  They noted the problems that
embedded products which used the closed-source Broadcom driver
have had with GPL compliance, and present their GPL-licensed
driver as a "no worries" alternative.

> It's all about what you're used to. You can automount stuff if you want,
> but I *like* the mount/unmount mechanism.

It works particularly nicely if you have "unmount and eject"
as a GUI button.

The thing I like most about disabling automounting is
that it allows me to have a blank CD in the laptop's
CD drive, just waiting for the occasion when it will
become useful.