OpenBSD Journal

Another wireless driver - ural

Contributed by grey on from the vendors who do their part to help consumers dept.

Thanks to Kiraly Zoltan for writing in with the following great news in our continued efforts to work with wireless chipset vendors. And for the few vendors left who are still uncooperative, keep telling them what kind of support we expect from them if they want our money.

Theo de Raadt writes to misc@ :

We are happy to announce that Ralink has given us documentation so that we could rapidly develop a USB 2.0 driver for the Ralink RT2670 802.11 a/b/g chipset. Thanks Ralink!

This new driver is the ural(4) driver. It is split from the ral(4) driver for the moment because we are tight on time before the release.

While the driver is still early in developemnt, and perhaps not fully functional for all modes, it will ship in OpenBSD 3.7.

In recent months Ralink PCI/Mini-PCI/Cardbus and USB devices have been aggressively taking over the market from other established leaders -- we expect our users to find them in all the stores soon.

an (4) - Aironet Communications 4500/4800 IEEE 802.11FH/b wireless
network ath (4) - Atheros IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless network
atu (4) - Atmel AT76C50x USB IEEE 802.11b wireless network
atw (4) - ADMtek ADM8211 IEEE 802.11b wireless network
awi (4) - BayStack 650 IEEE 802.11FH PCMCIA wireless network
ipw (4) - Intel PRO/Wireless 2100 IEEE 802.11b wireless network
iwi (4) - Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG/2225BG/2915ABG IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless network
ral (4) - Ralink Technology RT2500 IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless network
ray (4) - Raytheon Raylink/WebGear Aviator IEEE 802.11FH wireless network
rln (4) - Proxim RangeLAN2 IEEE 802.11b wireless network
rtw (4) - Realtek 8180 IEEE 802.11b wireless network
ural (4) - Ralink Technology RT2570 USB IEEE 802.11a/b/g wireless network
wi (4) - WaveLAN/IEEE, PRISM 2-3, and Spectrum24 IEEE 802.11b wireless network

There are not very many major vendors left. Just a few closed ones (TI ACX100/111, Connexant PrismGT, Broadcom crud). Again, feel free to drop them a note -- they love your mail.

Hopefully we can also get documentation on the new 802.11a/b/g Realtek that has just shown up on the market.

(Comments are closed)


Comments
  1. By SH (82.182.103.172) on

    It was not so long ago that wireless networking seemed to be something only supported well on Windows for newer network cards using something faster than 802.11b. This sure has changed :-)

  2. By StatiK76 (142.109.90.79) on

    Let'em hear ya!! Polite, professional, and to the point!

    ---------- Theo Snippet ------------
    Connexant
    Joseph Warren
    joe.warren@conexant.com
    321 327 6701
    regarding prismGT firmware licensing (bsd/isc license required)

    Intel
    Peter Engelbrecht
    peter.engelbrecht@intel.com
    858 391 1857
    regarding Centrino firmware licensing (bsd/isc license required)

    TI
    Bill Carney
    bcarney@ti.com
    707 521 3069
    regarding ACX100/111 firmware licensing (bsd/isc license required)

    Broadcom
    Let's get the other ones first, ok?
    -----------------------------------

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (68.165.27.173) on

      I already tried to (nicely) ask Broadcom, they basically told me to fuck off.

  3. By Anthony Roberts (68.145.103.21) on

    I hope we can make the vendors that have done the right thing feel good about their decision with good PR.

    Comments
    1. By Lennart Fridén (194.174.65.18) on

      Not to mention vote with our wallets. Next time, Ralink it is as far as I'm concerned. Anyone got any intel on the progress of drivers for Prism54 devices such as the 3Com Officeconnect 11b/g v1.0?

  4. By Anonymous Coward (198.103.92.245) on

    Has anybody managed to locate a ral(4) device on the web, in North America?

    I searched for a while when the post originally hit the mailing list, I found several that were for sale in Australia.

    Links to sites with the parts for sale would be appreciated.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (194.201.25.34) on

      Try looking for Edimax kit.

      Comments
      1. By Anonymous Coward (198.103.92.245) on

        Thanks! newegg has the Edimax EW-7108PCg.

    2. By Anonymous Coward (69.90.194.10) on

      I believe the PCUSA 802.11g card tigerdirect.ca is selling is ral(4). My card just arrived today, and I'll know for sure tonight.

  5. By rmg (208.181.115.2) on http://ryan.rsgraham.net

    I just recently bought an amd64 laptop and got a mini-pci wifi card put in it.

    After all the bad press about wifi in FOSS OS's, I just assumed I wouldn't be able to use it anywhere but windows. A while after getting it, I decided to actually look and see what the card was and it turned out to be one of these ralink cards, some company I'd never heard of.

    So I go in search of driver status under linux and find that ralink themselves actually wrote and then open sourced their own linux drivers a little while back and there is a small group maintaining/extending them now. A few hours later, what do I see on undeadly? This wonderful news. Wow, what a great day!

  6. By José Costa (82.155.156.28) on

    I'm a noob @ openbsd.

    I was playing with wireless cards (with linux) and some of them can change the mac address of the card.

    is there any card that openbsd supports this feature?

    Comments
    1. By tedu (64.173.147.27) on

      essentially, no.

    2. By mcbride (216.187.75.132) on

      wi(4) does, via wicontrol -m.

  7. By sbr (66.11.172.61) sbr@gnook.org on gnook.org/~sbr/

    im sitting on my toshiba using firefox of course and writting this and little pieces of data are flying through the air and through my fully function iwi wireless card. great job openbsd team :) i was so sick of that wavelan thing and openbsd 3.7 is really something. sbr.

    Comments
    1. By Anonymous Coward (192.6.19.203) on

      Tired of wavelan? Huh, to me, the good'ol' Lucent/Agere Wavelan/Orinoco Gold PCMCIA wi-fi cards are the best wireless products I've ever bought, $190 ea at the time (ouch!) but well worth the price.
      That said, I second you on the rest, thanks & kudos to the whole OpenBSD team for their work, and to vendors like Ralink for their understanding and openness.

  8. By Keith (82.70.31.250) keef_keef@hotmail.com on

    Hi, It's great to see that more wireless cards are getting supports. I have purchased three pcmcia wirless cards within the last year but unfortunatly all of them have had problems with openbsd. I guess the main problem is with myself not checking properly before purchasing but another problem is the different versions of the same cards not being supported. So my question is what is the best card to buy just now and where in the uk can i get it ? Cheers

    Comments
    1. By tedu (68.120.199.134) on

      before buying more cards, why not try the three you have again?

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