lubuntu-qa team mailing list archive

[Paul Gorski <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Open source vs proprietary. That's discussed somewhat in the Gentoo link. There is an open source driver for some of the Broadcom cards, but they all need to extract the Broadcom propriety firmware from the Broadcom software to work. There's no way that proprietary firmware is going to ship with Ubuntu or derivatives. (Broadcom might not even allow it.)

Now, if someone wants to come up with an entirely open source solution, that would solve the problem.

But as I understand it, just keeping the PPC port alive has been challenging.


 

Sincerely,
Paul Gorski
 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: UH <uhtlmk@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Paul Gorski <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Cc: PhillW <PhillW@xxxxxxxxxx>; lubuntu-qa <lubuntu-qa@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sun, Feb 26, 2012 5:48 pm
Subject: Re: [Lubuntu-qa] Lubuntu 12.04 ppc: no b43legacy support on live-cd


Thanks for all that infos. And i understand the situation pretty well,
i hope . . .

My only point is, that some time ago, i was able to get into the
internet booting from an ubuntu live-cd (9.10 or so) - and i didn't
have a wlanstick only the internal broadcom 4306 - but in some way the
cd did (i think by the option: you need a proprietarian driver -
translating from german here ;-) - with the help of jockey-gtk). Btw,
at those time i didn't go ubuntu since the cd drive was not supported
absolutely while in debian it was.

If there is no chance to provide an easy way to connect to the net
*FROM* the live-cd, which is in some way a must to do the installation
and if it's not asking too much, i'd say a nice how to for an average
mac user how to work around would be an excellent thing

2012/2/27 Paul Gorski <paul@xxxxxxxxxxx>:
> Regarding the b43 support, what you may have seen previously was the app
> (b43-fwcutter) that extracted the driver from the Windows firmware driver.
> The app may have been included, but not the propriety driver.
>
> The link Phill sent,
> https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx, explains it
> pretty well. But if you want some more technical information on it, visit:
> http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
>
> And the Gentoo Wiki explains the situation we're all in, stating what's at
> the Ubuntu link above, but explains it as: open source, NDIS Wrapper, and
> proprietary.  http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Broadcom_43xx
>
> Lastly, there's more information on the propriety drive at Broadcom's site,
> see the readme.txt.
> http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php
>
>
> Sincerely,
> Paul Gorski