"...This week Atheros Communications has made another step forward in enabling their wireless products on Linux. Atheros has released their HAL used for their 802.11a/b/g devices under the ISC. The ISC (or Internet Systems Consortium) is a BSD-derived free software license that is supported by the Free Software Foundation..."

While Linux desktop users have long been able to use Wi-Fi cards based on Atheros chip sets, they haven't been able to do so without using proprietary Atheros code.

Linux overcame most of its former driver woes years ago except for one noticeable exception: Wi-Fi drivers. While many Wi-Fi cards and chipsets were Linux friendly, two major Wi-Fi chipset vendors, Atheros and Broadcom, kept their drivers proprietary. Now, things are changing. Atheros has released a true open-source driver for its latest 802.11n chipsets.

If you use Wi-Fi on your laptop, there's an excellent chance you're using Atheros chipsets for your wireless networking. Atheros' silicon is in gear from Linksys, D-Link and Netgear to name but a few vendors. However, although Atheros has been popular, they haven't always been friendly to open-source and Linux developers.

"Atheros Communications has announced the release of free software wireless drivers for ath9k. The ath9k driver requires no proprietary binary blobs and works on several chipsets and over a dozen wireless devices..."

Even Linux distributions that contain only open-source applications, it turns out, often depend on proprietary firmware. Without binary blobs, common hardware like Atheros and Broadcom-based wireless cards, for example, would not work with distributions like Ubuntu. In other words, almost all of us, whether we realize it or not, still depend on proprietary software in one way or another.

Qualcomm Atheros has released the source code of firmware for two of its 802.11n wireless chips on GitHub.

Slackware 13.37 brings many updates and enhancements, among which you'll find two of the most advanced desktop environments available today: Xfce 4.6.2, a fast and lightweight but visually appealing and easy to use desktop environment, and KDE 4.5.5, a recent stable release of the 4.5.x series of the award-winning KDE desktop environment.

An enhanced Ext4 filesystem, an optimised TCP stack and support for thin provisioning in the Device Mapper are some of the most important new features of the freshly released Linux 3.2. The latest kernel version also brings with it a host of new and improved drivers which, among other things, address graphics hardware from Intel and NVIDIA and wireless devices from Atheros and Broadcom.