For those owning a laptop with a bitten apple on it and everyone else that is afflicted with a Broadcom 43xx chipset that is not supported by in-kernel drivers, you might be interested in the following facts:
- gentoo has net-wireless/broadcom-sta which I happily discovered just after writing a sucky ebuild for it.
- you absolutely need to disable SSB and b43 or blacklist them if you compiled these as modules because it will interfere very badly with wl driver (as in eth1 won’t show up at all). For some reason it worked just fine in 2.6.24-gentoo-r8 and that’s why I was stuck with it until today but in 2.6.28 and 2.6.29, it just silently failed and I was left with no wireless interface at all.
I have had mixed experience with the wl driver. It DOES get me online. But it doesn’t really support wireless power management as far as I can tell. It keeps my machine in C0 pretty much constantly.
I’m grateful that there is a driver, but I really hope that the in-kernel modules will support these bcm43xx cards soon.
yep, I’d really like it if I could just use an open source driver. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to happen that broadcom would just release their documentation so we can help them write a better driver.