Linux Wireless LAN Project 0.2.3 review

The goal of the Linux WLAN project is to develop a complete, standards based, wireless LAN system using the GNU/Linux operating syste

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 538K Developer: Mark S. Mathews

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The goal of the Linux WLAN project is to develop a complete, standards based, wireless LAN system using the GNU/Linux operating system.

The linux-wlan package is a linux device driver and subsystem package that is intended to provide the full range of IEEE 802.11 MAC management capabilities for use in user-mode utilities and scripts. The package currently supports the Intersil 802.11b Prism2, Prism2.5, and Prism3 reference designs for PCMCIA, PCI, and USB.

The package includes support for PLX9052 based PCI to PCMCIA adapter
with a few different PCMCIA cards.

Requirements:
To build linux-wlan-ng you will need:
Configured kernel source code for the kernel you are running. Ideally, this will be the resulting tree after building your own kernel. Configured means that you have at least run 'make config', 'make menuconfig', or 'make xconfig'. If you are trying to build
linux-wlan-ng for a previously existing kernel binary (one you did not build yourself), look for help on the mailing lists because it an be tricky. I always run against kernels I've built myself, so I'm not much help in this area.
The good David Leffler identified that if you are having difficulty with *_netlink_* symbols, you may have a problem with 'make clean' in the kernel tree. Do a 'make mrproper' followed by 'make config' and the rest of the kernel build process. 'make mrproper' does a more thorough cleaning of the kernel tree. For more info, look
for David's comments in the linux-wlan-user mailing list.
If you are building a driver for a PCMCIA card, you will also need the configured PCMCIA source code for the pcmcia_cs subsystem you are currently running.

What's New in This Release:
WEXT 16+ fixes, which came to a head with v2.6.14+ kernels.
Fix a circular symbol dependency glitch
Fix a potential panic when receiving unknown CONTROL frames.
get rid of p80211frm.c entirely; it's all unused code.
Fix prototype for pci_suspend functions to match 2.6.11+ APIs.
Build fixes for 2.6.14+
Change the type of 'request_pending' to take care of warnings.
Fixes for warnings generated by the 'sparse' tool (Richard Kennedy)
Add an explicit README.firmware containing copyright information on the firmware images.
Compile fixes for 2.6.8 (Victor Seva Lopez)