ndiswrapper and WPA on Fedora Core 4 (FC4)
Well, finally caving - I went with using ndiswrapper so I could have WPA protection on my wireless network. Now however, I'm wondering about the impacts of ndiswrapper on OEM support for linux.
Back in this post, you'll noticed I opted for the prism54 driver. I think the only thing holding me back was that I didn't want to use a userspace application (runs in the background) for WPA (wpa_supplicant). From what I've read, WEP stays at the kernel and driver level, and WPA via ndiswrapper piggybacks on Wireless Extensions, thus requiring the background process and the ndiswrapper kernel module.
If you download a recent version of wpa_supplicant, or directly from CVS - you'll even see the beginnings of prism54 support. According to the hostap mailing list:
Can you please look at hostapd WPA support for prism54 cards ? I do lot of work with creating specially kernel for me (for wireless routing) with prism54 support (WE 18) and now i'm just waiting :-(
It looked like the version in Linux 2.6.11 does not include support for number of things needed for hostapd operations. In addition, development for that driver did not look very active anymore. As such, I don't know whether I should be spending much time with it unless there is people who are willing to use time on continuing the development of the driver with WPA support in mind and making sure that the Linux kernel has a version that can be used with hostapd.
And it's true, the prism54 website doesn't show much real action for over a year. There was an update in January that stated WPA was/is planned for the next version. But after that, it's been silent.
If you're not familiar with ndiswrapper, it's a pretty sweet deal. Simply take your Win32 driver files, and point ndiswrapper to the *.inf file. As a kernel module, ndiswrapper will then act as the layer between the kernel and the windows drivers. Keep in mind that ndiswrapper usage is limited to wireless cards. However, I've noticed in various Linux forums and messageboards that users tend to recommend the ndiswrapper approach versus the prism54 approach. Both seem equally stable, and ndiswrapper gives you the added benefit of WPA capability through wpa_supplicant. So, adding up the points, it looks like ndiswrapper has a slight edge over the prism54 driver.
It may just be me, but I don't like having to rely on Windows drivers for an open-source operating system. In addition, many vendors only offer their drivers in an Win32 *.exe install file - that you have to either copy from a Windows machine or set up Wine. I guess I'm still hoping WPA via prism54 is all.
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