On Sun, 26 Mar 2006, Frank-Michael Fischer wrote:

Sometimes we just need to take into account the sheer number of non-native English speakers here. What Andreas meant to say most likely was: Novell/SUSE supports only HW configuration fulfilling at least one of the two conditions: Your wlan card works out of the box or you must have wired internet access. The real outcome is: ndiswrapper is not supported anymore since you might need it in order to have it.

ndiswrapper was never supported, and probably never will be supported by SUSE / Novell. It's simply impossible for our kernel developers to debug problems that might occur when loading windows binary-only drivers with ndiswrapper. Regards Christoph

On Sun, 26 Mar 2006, Marcus Meissner wrote:

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Sometimes we just need to take into account the sheer number of non-native English speakers here. What Andreas meant to say most likely was: Novell/SUSE supports only HW configuration fulfilling at least one of the two conditions: Your wlan card works out of the box or you must have wired internet access. The real outcome is: ndiswrapper is not supported anymore since you might need it in order to have it.

ndiswrapper was never supported, and probably never will be supported by SUSE / Novell. It's simply impossible for our kernel developers to debug problems that might occur when loading windows binary-only drivers with ndiswrapper.

That absolutely does not explain why it got removed from the CDs.

That's not what I was trying to explain. But my guess would be that it got removed due to the fact that we can't support it and it beeing disliked a lot by our kernel teams. At the end of the day it's AJ's decision. Regards Christoph

On Mon, Mar 27, 2006 at 09:39:46AM +0200, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

Christoph Thiel writes:

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That's not what I was trying to explain. But my guess would be that it got removed due to the fact that we can't support it and it beeing disliked a lot by our kernel teams. At the end of the day it's AJ's decision.

The kernel teams gave me a big veto and asked not to ship it on the media due to the fact that we cannot debug any issues when ndiswrapper is in use,

What about the customers? ndiswrapper is the only (Novell seen) legal way to run Atheros Wireless and prism54 v3 cards (and probably some more). Why do I need Internet if I just need the SL CDs and the Windows Driver CD? Ciao, Marcus

Hey, I will be the first to admit that ndiswrapper is incredibly buggy, and that novell definitely shouldn't have to support it. However, I totally agree that it is a necessary piece of software for a linux distro, and that it is necessary to have it on a cd for people that need ndiswrapper to get in the internet. So please just include it, but with a message (also warning about the instability). You might as well display the message when people go to install it in YaST2, just like the messages when people go to install fortune or some proprietary packages. -----Original Message----- From: Peter Czanik [mailto:pczanik@fang.fa.gau.hu] Hello, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

The kernel teams gave me a big veto and asked not to ship it on the media due to the fact that we cannot debug any issues when ndiswrapper is in use,

Another idea: put ndiswrapper on the install media, as some people can't get Internet available without it, but also make a note of it at the 'installation support ' description (about page 254 in suse 10.0 startup guide) saying, that: "no support is available for ndiswrapper based network setups, and we can not provide kernel support either" Configuring ndiswrapper needs more technical knowledge anyway, than provided by the free installation support ;-) But lack of it can cause a lot of inconvenience for those who need it. Bye, -- CzP http://peter.czanik.hu/

On 27 Mar 2006 at 11:42, Andreas Jaeger wrote: [...]

That sounds like an option, I'm adding now "No support is available for ndiswrapper based network setups, and we will not accept bug reports against the kernel if the ndiswrapper kernel module is loaded."

If it's unloadable: "... is or was loaded in the running kernel". However you'll have a hard time proving it was loaded before any crash ;-) Regards, Ulrich

Ulrich Windl schrieb:

On 27 Mar 2006 at 11:42, Andreas Jaeger wrote:

[...]

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That sounds like an option, I'm adding now "No support is available for ndiswrapper based network setups, and we will not accept bug reports against the kernel if the ndiswrapper kernel module is loaded."

If it's unloadable: "... is or was loaded in the running kernel". However you'll have a hard time proving it was loaded before any crash ;-)

IIRC it taints the kernel (in recent kernels only). Regards, Carl-Daniel

Christoph Thiel wrote:

ndiswrapper was never supported, and probably never will be supported by SUSE / Novell. It's simply impossible for our kernel developers to debug

Ok. Let me get this straight: you mean *SUSE kernel developers* or *main kernel developers*? IMHO, SUSE doesn't have to care about it, considering you (the distro) get the module and the binary working and loading, the rest is with ndiswrapper developers. -- % Mauricio Teixeira (netmask) % mteixeira{a}webset{d}net <> Maceio/AL/BR % http://mteixeira.webset.net <> http://pmping.sf.net

Frank-Michael Fischer wrote:

Sometimes we just need to take into account the sheer number of non-native English speakers here. What Andreas meant to say most likely

I can't see why it would make me misunderstand the issue. In fact, he didn't give a detailed explanation.

of the two conditions: Your wlan card works out of the box or you must have wired internet access. The real outcome is: ndiswrapper is not

IMHO it's a shame. So I shall be forced to buy some specific cards just because I can't have ndiswrapper on CD, although they work perfectly with it (ndiswrapper)? Since I can remember people work to have hardware supported, not simply drop it (unless they find problems with licenses, which is simply not the case). So the question remains. If I have WLAN only, no wired net, and I need ndiswrapper to make my net working, what should I do? It doesn't make sense. :) -- % Mauricio Teixeira (netmask) % mteixeira{a}webset{d}net <> Maceio/AL/BR % http://mteixeira.webset.net <> http://pmping.sf.net

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:

There is a license problem. Ndiswrapper is needed for certain (windows) closed source network drivers which cannot be legally inserted into a GPL

I *may* be wrong, but in this case you're not violating any license because you OWN the hardware, and the software that comes with it. The issue about close vs GPL, is already solved, the same way as NVIDIA drivers. -- % Mauricio Teixeira (netmask) % mteixeira{a}webset{d}net <> Maceio/AL/BR % http://mteixeira.webset.net <> http://pmping.sf.net

On 29 Mar 2006 at 13:55, Mauricio Teixeira wrote:

Carl-Daniel Hailfinger wrote:

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There is a license problem. Ndiswrapper is needed for certain (windows) closed source network drivers which cannot be legally inserted into a GPL

I *may* be wrong, but in this case you're not violating any license because you OWN the hardware, and the software that comes with it.

You may OWN the hardware, but you don't really OWN the software. See the licence text that comes with it. If you'd own the software you could give out your own licenses for it.

The issue about close vs GPL, is already solved, the same way as NVIDIA drivers.

SuSE doesn't include these neither, or what? Regards, Ulrich