[kwlug-disc] ubuntu 9.04 and broadcom wireless -- out of the box?

[Khalid Baheyeldin]

On Tue, Jun 23, 2009 at 12:30 PM, Robert P. J. Day <rpjday at crashcourse.ca>wrote:

>
>  in a day or two, i'm going to install ubuntu 9.04 on one of my
> gateway laptops which has a broadcom BCM4318 wireless chip.  will that
> work out of the box and detect and connect to visible wireless
> networks, or will i have to manually download and install the
> appropriate broadcom firmware as i do with fedora?  thanks.
>

Broadcom has always been a pain with Linux, but to varying degrees.

My daughter has a Dell with this chipset. She got it free in a contest, so
it was not a choice to go for this chipset. The other laptops we have are
all Intel based and work out of the box.

On Kubuntu 8.10, it takes some tinkering to get that Dell going with
wireless,
(install 2 .deb packages, change the module loading configuration files,
then
change rc.local). The end result is that it works for both at home and in
university without any need for manual intervention.

I have some scripts to make it easy to configure this stuff on 8.10.

She had Kubuntu 9.04 briefly, but KDE 4.x on that distro is too unstable, so
we reverted. When she had 9.04, the Broadcom stuff worked without anything
special, manually or otherwise. It was KDE that had issues.

If you are on Gnome, this should be irrelevant, and Broadcom may well work
out of the box.
-- 
Khalid M. Baheyeldin
2bits.com, Inc.
http://2bits.com
Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.
Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability. --  Edsger W.Dijkstra
Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. --   Leonardo da Vinci
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