WiFi In Ubuntu Feisty Fawn

One of the major changes mentioned in yesterday's release announcement for the Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn Beta was "excellent wireless networking support". As I haven't yet blogged about the 802.11abg WiFi support in Feisty Fawn nor has it been covered on Phoronix, I decided to talk about it now with the Feisty Fawn beta release. For today's purposes I had loaded up Ubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn beta on a Lenovo ThinkPad T60, which has an integrated Intel 3945 wireless connection. I also had inserted a NetGear PCMCIA card, which at heart is an Atheros 802.11g Chipset.

Immediately upon booting Ubuntu I was made aware that in the Ubuntu Restricted Drivers Manager were two drivers enabled and turned on by default. The drivers were named Atheros Hardware Access Layer (HAL) and Intel PRO/Wireless 3945 Network Connection driver for Linux. With the "blob manager" automatically loading these two drivers, both wireless interfaces were activated "out of the box". Network Manager was also loaded by default, which connected to an open Phoronix wireless connection right away.

One of the essential features for Feisty Fawn was network-roaming support, which did make the deadline for inclusion. The objective of Ubuntu's network-roaming is to automatically connect/disconnect to and from various dynamically configured networks and ultimately providing a better user experience when connecting to these networks. You can enable roaming mode for a wireless interface through Network Settings (System > Administration > Network).

For technical reference, the specific Chipset from Atheros I used was the AR5212 802.11abg NIC and was revision 01. The Intel PRO/Wireless 3945ABG was revision 02. To briefly sum up everything I had tried with the wireless networking support in Feisty Fawn, I was extremely pleased by what I had seen. Both the Atheros AR25212 and Intel 3945ABG wireless interfaces had worked immediately upon booting Ubuntu Feisty Fawn through the Restricted Drivers Manager and managing the wireless connections through NetworkManager. There was no installing extra packages or dealing with any firmware or any configuration files. For new users, the networking support found in Feisty Fawn is a godsend. I haven't tried any Broadcom 802.11g WiFi chips with Feisty Fawn, but most of those (if not all) should work as well. Fedora 7 is also supposed to have rock solid wireless support. However, at this point the wireless support in Fedora 7 doesn't look as promising as Ubuntu's due to the tighter free standards with Fedora when it comes to binary blobs and firmware.

Posted by Michael Larabel on March 24, 2007.