Inclusion of "special" madwifi drivers for new laptops

[Guest]

Currently ASUS has been selling huge numbers of the new ultralight notebook computer. Acer is about to do the same thing through Walmart. I believe these computers are all using the Atheros (AR5006/7EG) wireless cards. Madwifi has a special patched set of drivers for these cards that is currently not in the main trunk. They are still working out licensing issues but for now are OK with distributing the source. ASUS has a working set of drivers and Acer will need to have them too as their primary OS will be gOS.

I think that this would be an opportunity to take advantage of a ready made market if these drivers were to auto install on computers with this card. This is being typed on a Compaq Presario F750US that has this same card. As of yet I haven't tried the madwifi drivers because I haven't taken the time to compile the kernel to create the files the drivers build from. If somebody were to make them available I would be most appreciative. There is the ability to use the ndiswrapper and the net5211.inf which I haven't gotten to work properly yet either. But wouldn't it be sweet to not have to resort to using the windows driver?

In conclusion I am using Mint (Fluxbox) on my laptop because it was more "feature perfect" for my needs than the other 15 or so distros I've tested on this laptop. I believe that the inclusion of these drivers would greatly enhance the adoption and usage of Mint in the immediate future.

Thanks,

ShadeTree