On my laptop system, I have a Cisco Aironet MPI350 that works great
with firmware revision 5.60.21. Unfortunately, the wireless/airo driver
in 2.6.16 does not work, though the 2.6.17 version of that driver does.
As a result, I've been compiling the 2.6.17 version of wireless/airo
every time a new kernel upgrade from openSUSE comes in.
This process for me is still much better than using the previous
firmware (forgot the exact version number) with the 2.6.16 and earlier
drivers, which occasionally dropped the connection and could only be
recovered by either rebooting or rmmod/modprobing airo (and, sometimes,
froze during the rmmod). I thought it's probably time to mention it in
case if it's possible to get the 2.6.17 version of wireless/airo
patched into openSUSE's default kernel (my feelings won't be hurt if
the answer is no). I've been using the 2.6.17 wireless/airo driver with
the 5.60.21 firmware since May, and it's worked very well for me, but
I'm only one data point..
If including the 2.6.17 wireless/airo driver in openSUSE is acceptable,
then I can also help out by transforming it into a patch that can go
into the RPM build, if that helps.
Thank you for your consideration, and thanks for the awesome product
that is openSUSE :-)!
As a related item, one of my servers connects using the 2006090409 CVS
version of the rt2570 driver for a USB wireless adapter, and it's
worked great with SuSE and openSUSE since this time last year (using
earlier versions of that driver, of course). It would be nice if
openSUSE included that driver, too, as I also have to compile that one
when a new openSUSE kernel becomes available, though I can put the
detail into another email message. Again, thanks for the great work you
all have put into openSUSE :-)!