I got recently a USB Wireless Adaptor, produced by Aztech. It was a good buy for several reasons:
- It advertised Linux support
- It was affordable
- It had good quality casing; you can step on it and it won’t break
- It had the Penguin on the box and was really really cheap
When I plugged it in on my Linux system, it did not work out of the box. The kernel acknowledged that a USB device was inserted (two lines in /var/log/messages) but no driver claimed the device.
With the package came a CD which had drivers for several operating systems, including Linux. Apparently one would need to install the specific driver. I think the driver was available in both source code and as a binary package (for some kernel version).
The kernel module on the CD was called zd1211, so I checked whether my kernel had such a module installed. To my surprise, there was such a kernel module, called zd1211rw. I hope you have better chance with the URL because now the website appears to be down (Error 500).
Therefore, what was wrong with my zd1211rw kernel module? Reading the documentation of project website, I figured out that you have to report the ID (called the USB ID) of your adapter so that it is included in the kernel module, and when you plug in your device, it will be automatically detected.
You can find the USB ID by running the command lsusb. Then, it is a one-line patch for the zd1211rw driver to add support for the device,
— zd1211rw.linux2.6.20/zd_usb.c 2007-09-25 14:48:06.000000000
+0300
+++ zd1211rw/zd_usb.c 2007-09-28 11:35:51.000000000 +0300
@@ -64,6 +64,7 @@
{ USB_DEVICE(0x13b1, 0x0024), .driver_info = DEVICE_ZD1211B },
{ USB_DEVICE(0x0586, 0x340f), .driver_info = DEVICE_ZD1211B },
{ USB_DEVICE(0x0baf, 0x0121), .driver_info = DEVICE_ZD1211B },
+ { USB_DEVICE(0x0cde, 0x001a), .driver_info = DEVICE_ZD1211B },
/* “Driverless” devices that need ejecting */
{ USB_DEVICE(0x0ace, 0x2011), .driver_info = DEVICE_INSTALLER },
{ USB_DEVICE(0x0ace, 0x20ff), .driver_info = DEVICE_INSTALLER },
What Aztech should have done is to submit the USB ID to the developers of the zd1211rw driver. In this way, any Linux distribution that comes out with the updated kernel will have support for the device.
It is very important to get the manufacturers to change mentality. From offering a CD with “drivers”, for free and open-source software they should also work upstream with the device driver developers of the Linux kernel. The effort is small and the customer benefits huge.
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