Wireless

Finally got around to buying myself a USB wireless thingy. Only took me almost a year to do that. Oh well.

The device is made by Peabird, and uses the ZyDAS ZD1211 chipset. The driver for this chipset has been written and (consecutively) GPL'ed by the manufacturer, which is a good thing. It does need a firmware blob to be used, however, which is unfortunate, but, well. I guess that's standard procedure these days.

What's less interesting is that the driver hasn't made it into the vanilla kernel yet, other than the driver for the ZD1201, it's 802.11b counterpart. That's a pity, but not something I can't handle. At least it works, and I don't have to do anything totally out of the ordinary (apart from compiling a module)

It also appears this module hasn't been packaged yet. Maybe that'll happen—but seen how I don't understand a <censored> about the kernel internals, I don't feel too inclined to do that. Especially not since the firmware blob required by this module is embedded in a .h file, rather than in a separate file for /usr/lib/hotplug/firmware, as would be required to package it.