My parent’s laptop has got a Belkin PCMCIA (is that the right abbreviation!?) wireless card which uses the Ralink RT2500 chipset. Before I left to university, and for the last few distro release rounds, we’d set it up using Ubuntu as this worked with this chipset out of the box (I’m pretty sure Ubuntu used a proprietary driver for this?), while Fedora would have required building kernel bits and bobs.
While I’ve been away at uni my Dad updated the system to Ubuntu 7.10 and when he rebooted found that wireless no longer worked; he tried a fresh install and still wireless no longer worked. After a quick google I discovered that everybody was having this problem and support for this chipset had been broken in 7.10; the only solution I found was to build the kernel bits and bobs manually from serialmonkey just like the previous situation in Fedora!
Not wanting to do this, and remembering all the super cool improvements to Fedora wireless support in 7 & 8 I thought we could give it a shot. And you know what? It works out of the box
Even better, being Fedora I’m sure that this is working thanks to an open source driver!! Thanks to everyone responsible … Hopefully looking forward to more NetworkManager integration in F9, just to save me those 2 mins when I turned the service on :p (DVD install…)
Best wishes all!
P.S. More interviews are now on the way – questions will be getting sent out once I’m settled back at uni for the new term. Thanks in advance to everyone who’s agreed to take part so far!