Broadcom drivers have arrived

[elija]

http://blogs.computerworld.com/new_l...drivers_arrive

finally!

[jayd512]

Error 404...

But just yesterday I was reading an article with a similar title, but managed to lose the link!

[elija]

I got a 404 the first time - I think it has also been digged

[edit]Yep. It's been digged. Be patient with it[/edit]

[L4Linux]

That's a reason to celebrate!
One less obstacle for world domination!

[techieMoe]

I noticed at the end of the article that this driver should be included in Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid. I will be very pleased if I can boot that on my desktop and have wireless out of the box.

[bigtomrodney]

That's great news, but I see it still requires the proprietary firmware. That should make distributing it tricky enough....or at least no different to what we have now. With the open source b43 and bcm_43xx drivers I never got faster than 11Mbps, but waterhead (I think) was saying you could set it for 54Mbps manually.

So eh, without being cynical, where does this leave us relative to where we were?

[techieMoe]

That's great news, but I see it still requires the proprietary firmware.

I wasn't aware of this. Please elaborate.

[elija]

So eh, without being cynical, where does this leave us relative to where we were?

Pretty much the same place we are with Nvidia

[GNU-Fan]

Semi-OT, but I was just listening to a nice song when I came across this thread.
It is somewhat fitting in this context and I enjoyed this song, so I thought I would share:

http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html#39

[bigtomrodney]

I wasn't aware of this. Please elaborate.

WEll the b43 and bcm_43xx drivers in the past have been fully open source and quite functional but have required the original Broadcom firmware to work. You can run a script to download them from Broadcom and split them out from the Windows driver. This gave you a pretty good solution. Personally I found myself stuck at 11Mbps (802.11b) each time but as I mentioned this can actually be remedied.

Now according to this article

Now, the drivers aren't, as Hull points out, completely open source. "It is currently only partially open-source, similar to ATI or NVIDIA video drivers, so keep this in mind when deciding if you want to use it." In other words, you'll still need the proprietary Broadcom firmware. If you're not a free-software absolutist though, you'll be able to use these drivers

We're in the same boat.

I'm glad Broadcom are coming on board to help out. That's a great step. But it seems to me the driver wasn't the problem so much as the proprietary firmware blob that can't be distributed...

So yeah, I am grateful but I guess in terms of having a working Broadcom card with an open source driver this is no difference at all other than a blessing from the manufacturer.