Broadcom WiFi -- for a public library -- in Fedora 13 maybe?

[Bill Sconce]

I got an e-mail a couple of weeks ago, from a public library in a
small New Hampshire town, with the subject

    HELP SAVE US FROM MICROSOFT!

(I am not making this up.)  Such a plea caused me to do some
perhaps-foolish things.  I called the library; I volunteered
to help them; I omitted to ask what hardware was involved.

Turns out they had acquired a pair of Dell E5500 laptops (under
a Gates Foundation grant, I believe), and of course the machines
came with you-know-who's software.  And not just the operating
system, but a selection of add-on cruft including DeepFreeze and
"role management" apps, the combination of which proved to be a
nightmare and impossible to get or keep working.  Eventually
someone suggested to the library that the "Linux community"
might be able to help; somehow my name came up, and I received
the HELP SAVE US message.

After an initial visit, I burned a Fedora 13 live CD for them
to try, took it over to the library, booted it and showed it off.
All OK.

But then the zinger: of COURSE...they only use wireless.  And
of COURSE...the laptop has a Broadcom Wifi adapter.  And of course
it doesn't work.

I've spent today so far researching. I searched my GNHLUG archives
and found only one discussion, circa 2/22.(*)

>From the Web it looks like "fwcutter", proprietary firmware
copyrights, kernel modules...pretty ugly.  (And Latitudes use
Nvidia, but it does seem that Fedora 13 has the Nvidia part
working.)

Does anyone have experience, either with this laptop (Dell
Dimension E5500) or with getting a $#! Broadcom adapter to work
(a 4318 apparently) -- or experience which justifies a decision
to just not do this?


Many thanks!

Be_careful_what_you_volunteer_for'ly yrs,

-Bill


(*) 2/22: Wherein Alan Johnson offers the clearly definitive advice,
     "In any case, be sure to steer clear of Broadcom".