[Gnewsense-dev] Re: Libre wifi for Ben Nanonote (was: Re: Libre GNU/Linux PDAs)

[Daniel Clark]

On Sat, Jan 16, 2010 at 11:26 PM, Wolfgang Spraul <address@hidden> wrote:
> Daniel,
>
>> I'm vaguely aware of this, but since the driver is fully GPL most
>> likely people will eventually get it working quite well; this seems to
>> be what happened with ath9k, which sucked for a long time but in
>> 2.6.32 seems to be very nice.
>
> I highly doubt that will happen with the 6001. I don't want to go into the
> details of the firmware revisioning here etc. It just won't happen.
> Why do you think the KDDI microSD card (which may never be produced) has
> a 6001? The 6001 is an old chip and not recommended or supported for new
> designs. The 6002 moved away from flash so you need to load a binary blob
> at boot time (more about that below).

I was under the false impression that everything in the Atheros AR600x
series didn't need binary blobs; apologies.

The KDDI microSD card specifically says it uses AR6002, so I guess it
is no better than the card you guys were already considering.

The http://www.cardaccess-inc.com/products/index.php?a=wlan_burt is an
SD sized Atheros AR6001GZ chipset device (exactly the same chipset as
the openmoko freerunner as far as I can tell), so perhaps that + the
microSD to SD adapter mentioned earlier is an option for people who
refuse to use any hardware that requires binary blobs.

Cheers,
-- 
Daniel JB Clark | http://pobox.com/~dclark