Broadcom(Airport extreme) drivers reverse engineered

Post by **Patrick** » Tue Dec 06, 2005 6:51 am

Reason for celebration for Apple owners running linux:
http://www.osnews.com/comment.php?news_id=12886

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Dec 06, 2005 11:35 am

I say go get an Atheros-based card, pretty much all of them works quite well on Linux

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 2:10 pm

I was reading on Planet Fedora today that there is now a working Ariport Extreme driver in Fedora Rawhide. Doesn't matter to me, but there seem to be a fair number of Apple users running the PPC version of Fedora.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Mon Jan 09, 2006 3:04 pm

Gomer_X wrote:I was reading on Planet Fedora today that there is now a working Ariport Extreme driver in Fedora Rawhide. Doesn't matter to me, but there seem to be a fair number of Apple users running the PPC version of Fedora.

It might be Yellowdog that accounts for the big group of PPC Fedora users, since Yellowdog is largely based on Fedora, but highly tweaked to run on Macs.

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 11:00 am

Tsuroerusu wrote:
Gomer_X wrote:I was reading on Planet Fedora today that there is now a working Ariport Extreme driver in Fedora Rawhide. Doesn't matter to me, but there seem to be a fair number of Apple users running the PPC version of Fedora.
It might be Yellowdog that accounts for the big group of PPC Fedora users, since Yellowdog is largely based on Fedora, but highly tweaked to run on Macs.

From what I've read, there are quite a few on the Fedora development team who run Macs. There has been a PPC port in existence for a while, but it has only been official since FC4 (iirc). I know they've used some Yellow Dog stuff to make it work.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 12:44 pm

Gomer_X wrote:From what I've read, there are quite a few on the Fedora development team who run Macs. There has been a PPC port in existence for a while, but it has only been official since FC4 (iirc). I know they've used some Yellow Dog stuff to make it work.

Well, fair enough then, I guess them guys over at the Fedora team like PowerPC

SUSE also had a "hidden" PowerPC version until 10.0

(Just had to say it

)

Gomer_X · Post by **Gomer_X** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 9:04 am

Tsuroerusu wrote:Well, fair enough then, I guess them guys over at the Fedora team like PowerPC

SUSE also had a "hidden" PowerPC version until 10.0
(Just had to say it )

More Linux distros on more platforms = more goodness.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 11:06 am

Gomer_X wrote:More Linux distros on more platforms = more goodness.

Indeed so, I'd actually love to see the Sparc architecture become more popular, because it is probably the only architecture that's truly "open", the designs of the CPU, and some of the stuff that Intel and AMD keeps hidden on their x86 chips, is released under the LGPL, I wonder why Debian is dropping Sparc support since the Intel architecture itself actually is against their free software guidelines, weird thing right?

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 12:13 pm

Tsuroerusu wrote:
Gomer_X wrote:More Linux distros on more platforms = more goodness.
Indeed so, I'd actually love to see the Sparc architecture become more popular, because it is probably the only architecture that's truly "open", the designs of the CPU, and some of the stuff that Intel and AMD keeps hidden on their x86 chips, is released under the LGPL, I wonder why Debian is dropping Sparc support since the Intel architecture itself actually is against their free software guidelines, weird thing right?

It just isn't widely used. Gentoo still has Sparc support

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 12:22 pm

CptnObvious999 wrote:It just isn't widely used.

Well, if it was possible to build a Sparc box yourself, that wouldn't have any sort of Sun branding on it, but would be like a self-built x86 PC, that's clean and does whatever the parts was intended to, I think I would build myself a Sparc box just to try to see how it actually is.

CptnObvious999 wrote:Gentoo still have Sparc support

You know my opinions on Gentoo, and yes I did know that they support Sparc and UltraSPARC, and I just don't have the time to use it. If they added good binary package management to portage, kind of like FreeBSD does, I might consider it, but until I can get my entire system running in two hours, with a complete KDE, KOffice, OpenOffice and all that stuff, I'm not ever trying Gentoo again.

CptnObvious999 · Post by **CptnObvious999** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 12:33 pm

Sparc is a nice platform however it just lacks support and the x86 (and x86_64) market is much more competetive so thats where new stuff is always coming out at competetive prices. Plus there are next to no binary programs for Sparc for something like Flash or any commercial games.

Tsuroerusu · Post by **Tsuroerusu** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 12:39 pm

CptnObvious999 wrote:Sparc is a nice platform however it just lacks support and the x86 (and x86_64) market is much more competetive so thats where new stuff is always coming out at competetive prices. Plus there are next to no binary programs for Sparc for something like Flash or any commercial games.

Well, since the GNU project is aiming at providing a free Flash player, I strongly suspect that Flash soon might be platform independant, also I don't care about games, I have my GameCube and it rocks.