Chip - Credit: jpockele on Flickr

Many Broadcom users will no longer have to rely on ndiswrapper, as there is now new reverse-engineered firmware.

Linux developers have announced the release of a reverse-engineered open source firmware for Broadcom 4306 and 4318 wireless hardware, licensed under the GPLv2. ‘Although the base firmware is not fully 802.11 compliant, e.g., it does not support RTS/CTS procedure or QoS, we believe that someone could be interested in testing it. The firmware does not require the kernel to be modified and it uses the same shared memory layout and global registers usage of the original stuff from broadcom to ease loading by the b43 driver.’ You can go check out and download the firmware at the Italian Universita’ Degli Studi Di Brescia Open FirmWare for WiFi networks project page. This is a good example of clean room reverse engineering design where one group worked on specifications while another worked on the the driver and the firmware. Kudos to the specification writers and bcm43xx development team for their hard work.

hmm…this is good news but it’s kind of sad just thinking about how much time I’ve wasted with ndiswrapper and other lame hacks.

• Slashdot
• Berlios

Creative - Copyright info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Creative_logo.svg

[Phoronix] reports that Creative Labs has decided to license their binary X-Fi drivers under version 2 of the GNU General Pubic License.

Creative’s X-Fi on Linux has been far from a pleasant experience, but today that may begin to change. As a move that could be interpreted as either Creative Labs throwing in the towel or them simply acknowledging they want to play with the Linux and open-source communities nicely, they have announced the release of the source-code to their binary driver. This driver is a little less than 13,000 lines and all of it has been put under the GNU GPLv2 license.

The Creative XFiDrv 1.00 driver supports the Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeMusic, XtremeGamer, Fatal1ty, Platinum, Elite Pro, and Titanium series. The driver is capable of ALSA PCM playback, ALSA recording, and ALSA mixing. The current limitations for this driver are external I/O modules not being supported. The announcement was made on the Creative Forums and the full source-code is available for download from their support area (it is named XFiDrv_Linux_Public_US_1.00.tar.gz).

More and more companies are seeing the light and freeing their drivers. NVidia is really starting to stick out lately.

• [Phoronix]
• Slashdot

Atheros has released a free ath9k driver.

BOSTON, Massachusetts, USA — 28, July, 2008 — Atheros Communications has announced the release of free software wireless drivers for ath9k. The ath9k driver requires no proprietary binary blobs and works on several chipsets and over a dozen wireless devices.

“This increased support of wireless drivers by Atheros is a major step toward our vision of a laptop that runs only free software and that boots on top of a free BIOS,” says Peter Brown, executive director of the FSF.

The release of the ath9k driver comes shortly after Atheros hired Luis Rodriguez and Jouni Malinen, two important developers in the free software wireless driver community. The ath9k are now seeking inclusion in the Linux kernel. For more information on supported devices and chipsets visit http://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/net/wireless/cards.html#ath9k.

Can someone tell me the real implications of this? How any of Atheros’ cards does this cover?

• FSF