SMC sucks (but alas, they’re not the only one)
Since Hanneke came to live here, she brought her own computer. And we have a wireless network here, so it would be only fair to buy her a wireless PCI card so she can join in on our network and share our Internet line. All fine and dandy. But of course, me being me, I had already installed Ubuntu Linux (the recently gone-out-of-date Warty Warthog) so I decided to make sure I got a card for Hanneke that was supported by Linux. You’d expect most cards to be supported already, in any case, but alas, reality differs here. So I checked out the Prism 54 project, to see which companies offered cards that were supported by Linux. They have a list of supported cards so I checked with my online supplier which ones were available.
On that list is the SMC2802W which was on my suppliers list too, so that’s the one I bought. You guessed it, it doesn’t work. And I could’ve known if I weren’t in such a hurry to buy the card in the first place. Because on the herefore mentioned supporterd cards-site, there’s a disclaimer just above the list of supported cards:
We have a problem. Manufacturers started buying the SoftMAC chipsets, which are not yet supported and may never be, as drop-in-replacements for the FullMAC chipsets without changing PCI IDs and apparantly sometimes not changing even the FCC ID. That said, you are better off first testing a card before buying it. If you can’t test a card and want linux support, I can recommend you just not buy a prism 802.11g based chipset for now.
And the SMC I bought is, of course, a SoftMAC chipset. So it works on Windows XP (some obscure operating system that was already installed on Hanneke’s machine, looks a bit Teletubby-ish and doesn’t even have GNU utils, as far as I could see, let alone a decent development environment (I couldn’t even find the sources of the operating system, but then again, I didn’t search all that hard), so I think it’s still in development by some company or something), but not on Linux. And reading the disclaimer, it looks like a deliberate tactic to have working devices not work anymore. And it seems SMC isn’t even the only company using these tactics.
There’s a bug report about this in the Prism54 bugzilla. I hope they can fix this, I certainly don’t have the skills to fix it myself :(
Why do companies do this? I’m really frustrated. Mostly because it isn’t the first time this happened to me. I had the same trouble when buying a Wifi PCMCIA card for my laptop to use. Then it was a Linksys that just changed chipsets from one version to another, without changing the name of the product. I know use a Cisco Aironet 350 for my laptop, at least I could be sure that one worked. I’ll probably have to buy another card for Hanneke too :(
Chickens
Since Monday, we have chickens. Five of them, four hens and one rooster. They’ve already laid three eggs. Here are some pictures of them in our puppy kennel. Dad is building them a a henhouse in the back garden, with their night house inside a small stone shed we’ve standing there. I’ll post some pictures when dad is finished with it.
These are Barnevelders, a large breed with very nice plummage. They’re sitting on a night house for a dog, but they’re feeling quite alright there, it seems.
Update Foto’s removed. Sorry.
