For the love of Bob.... ugh!
This post will be the equivalent of a girl flipping the fuck out over a pair of shoes with something minuscule wrong with them. If you don't want to deal with that in terms of bios hacking and Atheros wireless cards, you probably don't want to read this post, because I haven't even started doing this process yet.
So today my new shiny awesome Atheros wireless card came in the mail. My dreams of fully hardware accelerated encryption, extended wireless range, flawless linux driver support, and saving 66% the cost of buying the card elsewhere have just been crushed. But why?
Here's why. HP/Compaq (Comcraq), Dell, IBM have decided that they'd like to make life harder for people. Their BIOS contains a very limited "Whitelist" of approved wireless cards for their notebooks, they claim it for FCC regulations, bullshit. Then why are all the cards on these whitelists cost 150 dollars more than the one I bought and have limited or drastically limited functionality in comparison? So they can make another quick buck on you because the computer you bought wasn't enough for you, that's why.
Well, that's fine, I'm more than fully capable of dealing with that bullshit. I've just finished doing my reading, I know what I'm up against. I don't like it, it's going to be very time consuming. But, I'm going to do it anyway. If I've wasted 500 hours of my time preening Gentoo installs and making everything perfect on the system, only for it to become out of date with dep breaks 2 weeks later. I can sure as hell spend 20 hours or less attending to this issue and risk toasting my Notebook Bios.
http://www.richud.com/HP-Pavilion-104-Bios-Fix/
This will give you a taste of what shit I'm going to do just so I can use something other than a broadcom chipset.
Do I really need to use this wifi card?
No, I have ndiswrappers available
I'm not even running linux right now
And how often am I really going to sit down to crack somebody's wireless network? Probably less than once every 6 months.
So this project is a nearly pointless undertaking.... Sweet!
Maybe I really should of just bought another pair of shoes instead of a wireless card. *sighs*
So today my new shiny awesome Atheros wireless card came in the mail. My dreams of fully hardware accelerated encryption, extended wireless range, flawless linux driver support, and saving 66% the cost of buying the card elsewhere have just been crushed. But why?
Here's why. HP/Compaq (Comcraq), Dell, IBM have decided that they'd like to make life harder for people. Their BIOS contains a very limited "Whitelist" of approved wireless cards for their notebooks, they claim it for FCC regulations, bullshit. Then why are all the cards on these whitelists cost 150 dollars more than the one I bought and have limited or drastically limited functionality in comparison? So they can make another quick buck on you because the computer you bought wasn't enough for you, that's why.
Well, that's fine, I'm more than fully capable of dealing with that bullshit. I've just finished doing my reading, I know what I'm up against. I don't like it, it's going to be very time consuming. But, I'm going to do it anyway. If I've wasted 500 hours of my time preening Gentoo installs and making everything perfect on the system, only for it to become out of date with dep breaks 2 weeks later. I can sure as hell spend 20 hours or less attending to this issue and risk toasting my Notebook Bios.
http://www.richud.com/HP-Pavilion-104-Bios-Fix/
This will give you a taste of what shit I'm going to do just so I can use something other than a broadcom chipset.
Do I really need to use this wifi card?
No, I have ndiswrappers available
I'm not even running linux right now
And how often am I really going to sit down to crack somebody's wireless network? Probably less than once every 6 months.
So this project is a nearly pointless undertaking.... Sweet!
Maybe I really should of just bought another pair of shoes instead of a wireless card. *sighs*