Airport Extreme vs. Linux

NOTE: This article is out of date and likely obsolete.

One of the reasons our Powerbook stays in Mac OS most of the time (aside from the fact that It Just Works™) is that Yellow Dog Linux 3.0 didn’t have drivers for Airport Extreme, so it can’t connect to the wireless network. I had hoped that YDL 4 (just released) would resolve this — perhaps the driver was only available for the 2.6 kernel, or something.

I finally started looking, and that’s not the case. It seems that the Airport Extreme chipset manufacturer, Broadcom, refuses to release Linux drivers or to release specs to allow anyone else to write Linux drivers.

Ah, well, I can do almost everything under Mac OS, and for those occasions that I actually need Linux, I can always go solo or plug in a cable, though it does limit where I can hook it up.

Why? (May 2005)

Why run Linux on a Mac? On a modern Macintosh system, it’s mainly a matter of “because I can.” Also, while it’s possible to install most OSS apps on Mac OS X, it’s often easier to use these apps in their native environment

On older systems, Linux is a lot less resource-hungry than OS X. If I were to pick up a G3-level machine, I might be more inclined to run mainly Linux. Tiger’s supposed to improve matters, but I’m not sure how well it does with older hardware.

Then of course there’s the politically-motivated, i.e. “I will run only Free Software unless I absolutely cannot avoid it.” Of course, in that case, I don’t see a major advantage to using Apple hardware over PC hardware.

Experimental Support (March 2006)

I’m reading the Fedora Core 5 release notes, and found one item particularly interesting:

There are new experimental drivers that provide support for the widely-used Broadcom 43xx wireless chipsets (http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/).

This is the chipset used in Apple’s Airport Extreme wireless networking interface, which is what you’ll find in just about every wireless-capable Mac made over the last few years. The project at Berlios has apparently reverse-engineered the chip to produce an open-source driver, with its first usable version in December

Now that Fedora Core has had two releases with full PowerPC support, I may just replace the Yellow Dog Linux partition with Fedora Core. A better security update policy, a wider range of applications, and possibly wireless network support. Sounds like it might be worth it.