Linux wireless drivers

I've been in contact with Imre from openwrt.org for quite some time, especially since he's now actively maintaining a lot of stuff on the ftp.gpl-devices.org ftp server.

Today I had a look at the current status of OpenWRT, and I was delighted to see that there is a lot of progress. Apart from the 2.4.x kernels with proprietary WLAN drivers for Broadcom platforms (like the wrt54g), they now work on supporting TI AR7 based systems and also on soekris hardware.

What is even more interesting are

• The bcm43xx driver project, aiming at at free software Broadcom wireless driver
• The bcm-specs project, trying to write specifications for the Broadcom wireless chipsets

I really hope that those projects will receive all the support they need, and at some point in the future we'll have excellent free software support for all those devices. If only the vendors were more cooperative from the beginning...