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.

Broadcom has become the last major manufacturer of wireless chips to support developers of open source Linux drivers

Could this be the badly needed 'fix' that we need in the wireless world with regard to Linux?

"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..."

The ath5k driver has been through more than the usual amount of legal trouble. This driver, for Atheros wireless chipsets, was originally reverse engineered and developed in the BSD community.

AMD has released a new driver for ATI Radeon-chipsets, version 9.12. This driver is suitable for 32bit, or 64bit Linux versions.

HP selling Linux PCs? Surely this must be a mistake?

Phoronix: "It was earlier this month that version 2.1.0 of the xf86-video-intel driver was released, which among other things had introduced open-source Linux graphics support for the G33, Q33, and Q35 chipsets..."

Yesterday we delivered benchmarks showing how the open-source ATI Radeon graphics driver stack in Ubuntu 10.04 is comparing to older releases of the proprietary ATI Catalyst Linux driver. Sadly, the latest open-source ATI driver still is no match even for a two or four-year-old proprietary driver from ATI/AMD, but that is with the classic Mesa DRI driver.