On Thu, Mar 17, 2011 at 08:27:32PM -0400, Daniel Staal wrote: > > The additional knowledge that Linux supports them means the manufacturer > isn't totally closed to supporting Open-source software, but tells us > nothing beyond that. Linux's support may be by way of a binary blob from > Linksys, which doesn't help FreeBSD at all. The cards would still need to > be reverse-engineered from scratch.
It doesn't even tell us that much. It may be that someone decided to spend an incredible amount of time and energy reverse-engineering the hardware interface for the device and the driver software used on another OS, then built a driver that has for some reason (probably licensing) presented enough of a challenge to incorporation into a BSD Unix system that building something similarly for FreeBSD has proved challenging (to put it kindly). > > If the manufacturer releases some technical documents on how to talk to the > cards, that's a start at helping people write drivers. Even if they do > nothing else. > > But chewing out Chad because he makes the guess that two cards he knows > nothing about are not supported because the manufacturer hasn't supplied > the support to make them supported (which they probably have on at least > Windows, if not Linux as well) is just blaming him for not being able to > read your mind about hardware you have in hand. Thanks. -- Chad Perrin [ original content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
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