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On Sun, 29 May 2005 19:19:19 +0100 Julian Hall wrote:
Hi All, Those with long memories may remember I had all kinds of grief previously with this card. Basically Pinnacle have changed the chip onboard from the old and *standard* BT8x series to a new chip called Bendino. They won't give out information to developers so anyone with one of these horrible cards cannot use it in Linux (I know I've been trying long enough). I had a thought this morning I would like to run by you guys and gals for feasibility: Ndiswrapper works as we know by taking the existing Windows driver and converting the information it provides from the Wifi hardware into a format that Linux can use. Simply put (and I know it is anything *but* a simple proposition!) *in theory* is there anything *technically* to stop a developer using the Windows XP driver for the new Pinnacle cards in an "ndiswrapper-like" environment? Please note I'm not enquiring about the legalities of licensing for various bits and pieces, as I know it's a minefield with EULAs, closed/open source, GPL, etc etc. Also I'm not a lawyer and I don't want to provoke a war about the rights and wrongs of whether it should be done. All I would like to know is, from a *purely* academic/technical viewpoint, could it be done? Kind regards, Julian
Bear in mind that I am no kernel hacker, I don't see why this should pose a serious problem to kernel hackers. As I see it, there are some modules that "link into" the kernel and provide "hooks" for yet more modules/drivers to attach to. Like the SCSI modules. Any individual scsi module doesn't really provide much by way of enabling the user to access, say, a cdrom drive. If we look at the Philips WebCam "drivers" for Linux, that also used this hooks principle - a Free module was available that provided a hook for the non-Free module to attach to, so you could get full functionality out of the webcam (as I recall, without the non-Free drivers the webcam worked, but they weren't as effective as with the non-Free drivers). So, I don't see that it should be too troublesome. The only thing I can think of that might cause problems is that the NDIS thing already existed in Windowsland, whereas I don't think (although I could be wrong on this) that there is any such pre-existing generic driver support for the Pinnacle cards. Grant. -- Artificial intelligence is no match for nuratal stidutipy. -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG Mail majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with "unsubscribe list" in the message body to unsubscribe. FAQ: www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html