> i was wondering if there were plans to support the intel wireless network card.
> Looking at the mailing list archives, the reason why not supported was that 
> intel was not giving out the specs.
> It seems that this has changed since there is now a sourceforge project dealing 
> with that (http://sourceforge.net/projects/ipw2100/).
 
Dear Renaud:

I seriously doubt it.  The Intel Centrino Wi/Fi cards are primarily software
based, in that they do not have their own processor, and need to use the main
CPU.  Think of the Centrino Wi/Fi cards as the wireless equivalent of those
cheapo win-modems that don't have UARTS to save on parts.  In the Windows
drivers, Intel implimented a lot of specialized software controling the radio
for the Wi/Fi.  Because of this, Intel will likely never release any truly
opensource driver (for Linux or *BSD), since they do not want any of their
competitors to use their driver radio software to impliment their own cheapo
processor-less Wi/Fi cards.  And if Intel did release the source it would
likely violate many broadcasting rules (CRTC-Canada, FCC-US, etc.) in
different countries since users could hack up the radio software in the
driver to make illegal broadcasts, especially on different frequences.

To the based of my knowledge, currently only Windows based NDIS drivers for
Intel Centrino Wi/Fi exist.  Both Linux & FreeBSD have NDIS driver support to
allow one to use Centrino Wi/Fi, but this is a horrible solution, since it is
equivalent to running Wine or Peace for a windows driver.  Someone could port
NDIS driver support into NetBSD, using the FreeBSD drivers as a base, but
personally it is not worth the trouble.

Someone at Intel is working on providing a project to provide Linux support
for Centrino Wi/Fi, and even put up a sourceforge project, but rumor has it,
that is just the entire Windows NDIS driver disguised as a binary firmware,
with a simplied NDIS wrapper.

That is why I finally gave up on Intel Centrino, and opened up my new notebook,
removed my Intel Centrino PRO/Wireless 2100 card and install a proper Atheros
5212 802.11g mini-pci type 3B Wi/Fi card.  Taking apart a notebook is not easy,
and you need a very clean, static free room, a can of compressed air, non-
conductive tape, large assortment of screwdrivers, and a lot patients.
(Remember what taking apart a laptop it is finesse not brute force.)

The Intel Centrino is a mini-pci type 3B (IIIB) card, that is about 5-6mm
shorter than the more common mini-pci type 3A (IIIA) cards.  Unless you are
sure that you have an extra 6mm of space above the mini-pci slot in your
laptop motherboard, don't bother with the taller type 3A cards.

I found an eBay vendor selling the Atheros 5212 mini-pci type 3B cards with
802.11a+b+g, which NetBSD supports:

http://cgi.ebay.ca/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=31534&item=3476606740&rd=1&ssPageName=WDVW

I was planning to buy more of these cards for myself, although I am not too
happy with his shipping policy for Canada.

A couple of bad things about these Atheros cards though.  First, the Atheros
mini-pci cards consume 600mA (2 Watts) of power when in use, compared to 200mA
(0.67 Watts for a Prism mini-pci type 3A card) and second, the current NetBSD
driver has a wierd bug that causes it to freeze network traffic every few
minutes:

http://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=25296

hopefully this will be fixed sometime soon.

I hope this helps.
Alicia.

PS. If you come across anyone else selling mini-pci type 3B Wi/Fi cards
	supported by NetBSD, please let me know.