At a few consume & free2air meetfests where people have brought along various wireless systems there have been ongoing problems achieving ad-hoc style wireless connectivity.

The benefit of connecting in a ad-hoc wireless mode means proprietary and often expensive access point (AP) hardware and software are not required to build infrastructure. Lucent began by implementing their own ad-hoc protocol and later wrote firmware support for the IEEE blessed IBSS peer to peer mode. The two do not interoperate at all.

This information is impossible to find on the Lucent/Agere support pages, but a kind member of their support staff emailed the clarification of IBSS & ADHOC modes including which firmware supports which mode, as well as version compatabilities with Windows drivers and how to support both modes with changing registry values. The document specifies GNU/Linux compatability only with regards to Lucent's closed source driver wavelan2_cs, not the open source wvlan_cs wireless driver.

.vortex