That's a good point. I think the author might be forgetting using ndis wrapper to run Windows drivers (so that's non-free software on the same machine as your O

That's a good point. I think the author might be forgetting using ndis wrapper to run Windows drivers (so that's non-free software on the same machine as your OS) for unsupported network cards. We've come farther and have new, different problems now. The situation then looked bleak much like the situation now.