If you're using our wireless drivers on Solaris today, then you probably know that we were only supporting WEP encryption in the past. There have been numerous requests for adding WPA support as well, and so I'm very happy to announce that we now have a ready-to-use solution available on OpenSolaris Laptop Community web page. Everything you need to know is documented on that page. Only Atheros (ath) driver supports WPA at this time. In order to start using WPA, you'll need to download and install ath-0.4 driver, wpa-0.1 daemon, and wificonfig-0.3 utility.

Two more drivers were released today on the OpenSolaris Wireless Networking web page . The first one is called ipw, and supports Intel Pro/Wireless 2100 chipsets. The second is called iwi, and supports Intel Pro/Wireless 2200BG and 2915ABG chipsets. Both of these drivers are based on the source code obtained from the Native *BSD Driver project. So if your laptop has Intel Centrino wireless network adapter, you can now go wireless with Solaris on it. Have fun!

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Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris, WiFi

I'm very excited to announce that today we've finally made one of our wireless drivers available for download from the OpenSolaris Wireless Networking web page. This is just one of the few wireless drivers that will be pre-released to the OpenSolaris Laptop community in the future in a similar way and I think it is indicative of how we're changing our development processes by making internal projects more visible outside of Sun. We hope that you'll find new ath driver and new wificonfig tool easy to use and will provide us with valuable feedback that will help us to get these components eventually integrated into Solaris with the highest quality.

Along with this release, we've also created new OpenSolaris Laptop Community. I encourage people interested in running Solaris on their laptops to subscribe to laptop-discuss@opensolaris.org and start using it.

Note that this is still work in development, and things may change before this gets putback into Solaris. Also, you may encounter some issues with the driver, but so far it has been extremely stable and a lot of work has been put into testing it in various configurations.

Have fun!

PS: If you're looking for a replacement mini-PCI card for your laptop I recommend getting Wistron's CM9 card based on the Atheros 5213 chipset. It works flawlessly on my Ferrari 3400 and I know a few other engineers in the Solaris Kernel Group who are successfully using these or similar cards.

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Technorati Tags: OpenSolaris, Solaris, WiFi