'hostap' drivers could be included in Ubuntu kernels

[Paul Sladen]

Hostap drivers work on many cards derived from prism2/orinoco chipsets. In some
cases (such as my ThinkPad...) they are the only drivers that work without
freezing (crashing) after a undetermined amount of time.

In addition, many people who have a choice use the hostap drivers in preference
as the hostap drivers enable both access-point Master (base-station) and Monitor
(promisc) modes in addition to the normal Managed and Ad-hoc client modes.
Monitor-mode additionally allows the use of kismet.

Please add these to the default kernel-build, or arrange for this to
automatically build as a separate package each time the kernel is revved.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

I was under the impression that (the basic functionality of) the same hardware
was supported by the PRISM drivers in the kernel; does hostap really provide
different hardware support?

I imagine that Fabio would appreciate a patch to add them, in any case ;-)

[Fabio Massimo Di Nitto (fabbione)]

I start to be less happy to add external driver. Between warty and the
development process for hoary we already seen a bunch of external
drivers/patches that can't be updated and upstream is dead.

[Ka-Hing Cheung (kahing)]

Actually hostap (as far as I know) is quite actively maintained. One issue is
that some cards need binary firmware that I am not sure of Ubuntu can
redistribute (they do not come with hostap).
I have a D-Link 520 rev-e card which is supported by hostap, but perhaps since
previous revisions are supported by the orinoco driver, hotplug loads that first
and when I then load hostap, it results in a crash. Right now I blacklist
orinoco and recompile hostap whenever there's a kernel update, but this clearly
is not an ideal solution.

[Matt Zimmerman (mdz)]

hostap is quite widely used and actively maintained. Despite this, it is not in
Linus' tree yet, and so it deserves some scrutiny on that account.

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

*** Bug 16307 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

[Chuck Short (zulcss)]

Added for breezy which will hit the archive soon.

[reh4c (gene-hoffler)]

I downloaded and installed the latest "Breezy" public snapshot. Almost all
hardware works great on my Fujitsu FMV-BIBLO LOOX T5/53W (even the 1280x600
screen is automatically detected). The only problem I'm having is with a
Prism 2.5 wavelan (Intersil) wireless minipci card that I've installed. The
card shows up under hardware, but does not show up under Network settings for
me to configure. I'm a relative newbie to the command line, so I haven't
done much from there. (I tried a newer prism GT card in the minipci slot,
and it worked fine with the kernel driver.) After reading about the prism
2.5 wavelan, I believe that the hostap driver is required for this card to
function. Concur with the bug originator that the hostap driver may solve my
(our) problems with this older card.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

Hi Gene,

If you do:

  sudo modprobe -r orinoco_pci
  sudo modprobe hostap_pci

does this work for you? You can see the card state with:

  /sbin/iwconfig