Finally Liberated

Bcoming with the approaching Intrepid Ibex release it seems like you finally will not have to use any closed source drivers on a Lenovo T60.

Right now with hardy I use fglrx and madwifi to get all the hardware working properly.

  • fglrx is needed because of the used r500 graphics chip, which got supported only recently with the mesa 7.1 release
  • madwifi is actually not really closed source, it just uses the closed source hal library in order to talk to the wireless chip

But with intrepid there are now better alternatives available:

  • mesa the open source driver now also supports the r500 chip in 3D and on top of that also offers superior 2D performance by using EXA
  • ath9k atheros has started supporting open source properly and got a working IEEE 802.11n wireless driver in the kernel in just several months. And it feels like ath9k connects a bit faster than madwifi. But it displays the wrong connection speed – the transfer rates are the same though.
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