• 8ender@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    6 months ago

    He died still fighting our greatest villain, flaky wifi, and for that I salute him

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldBEnglish
    8·
    6 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The Linux kernel community has sadly lost one of its longtime, prolific contributors to the wireless (WiFi) drivers.

    His wife shared the news of Larry Finger’s passing this weekend on the linux-wireless mailing list in a brief statement.

    Larry Finger began contributing originally to the Broadcom BCM43XX driver back in the day and over the years has contributed a lot to Linux WiFi drivers.

    His more recent contributions had been around the RTW88, RTW89, R8188EU, R8712, RTLWIFI, B43 and other Linux networking drivers.

    In part to his contributions, the Linux wireless hardware support has come a long way over the past two decades…

    Longtime Linux users will certainly remember the days of struggling with WiFi support, resorting to NDISWrapper for using Windows WiFi drivers on Linux, and other headaches compared to today’s largely trouble-free wireless hardware support.

    The original article contains 183 words, the summary contains 137 words. Saved 25%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

    • Tja@programming.dev
      101·
      6 months ago

      NDISWrapper… Those were the days. I’m still astonished such a hack even worked at all. Basically magic.

      • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
        4·
        6 months ago

        NDISWrapper was a big turning point for me - the first time I got Linux working and kept it for the life of the hardware, it was due to NDISWrapper.

      • friend_of_satan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        Fuckin seriously! I worked on WiFi back then and when I saw that my jaw hit the floor. Mad hacking skills, as in mad ability to find a solution within a crazy landscape.