Spent most of today cleaning up and shuffling a few wireless drivers in Gentoo Portage.

Thanks to Intel’s Open Source Technology Center, who were kind enough to sponsor me a brand new Sony Vaio VGN-FE550G laptop, I was able to test and verify the new ipw3945 driver along with the needed regulatory daemon and microcode. All of these are now available in a Gentoo Portage.

I’ve also shuffled the madwifi-driver and madwifi-tools around quite a bit. The previous ebuilds were renamed to net-wireless/madwifi-ng and net-wireless/madwifi-ng-tools. This allowed me to add ebuilds for the madwifi-old branch from upstream as requested in bug #125440. I recommend you stick to net-wireless/madwifi-ng over net-wireless/madwifi-old since this is where upstream development continues. If you happen to find a regression in madwifi-ng as compared to madwifi-old, please report it upstream.

The net-wireless/wpa_supplicant and net-wireless/hostapd ebuilds have been updated to work with either of the two madwifi branches.

Stay tuned for a “GNU/Linux on a Sony VAIO VGN-FE550G” HOWTO – I must say, this laptop is pretty fast (Core Duo 1.66GHz with 2GB RAM).

Wow, that was fast. The OSDL wireless summit is almost over before we got started, but we managed to coordinate and discuss an amazing amount of issues during the last two days.

Many interesting things have been discussed, including but certainly not limited to the Devicescape wireless stack, the recently included ieee80211-softmac stack and their future in the Linux kernel. Jean Tourrilhes gave an interesting talk on the history of wireless support in the Linux kernel, and Personal Telco Project gave some interesting insight into their problems with the current state of wireless support on embedded Linux.

More information will follow later. Tonight we will have an unofficial dinner with the Gentoo developers from around here, gonna be nice getting some faces tied onto the names from IRC and the mailing lists.