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

[Alan Johnson]

On Thu, Jun 10, 2010 at 2:11 PM, Bill Sconce <sconce at in-spec-inc.com> wrote:

> 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 since install Ubuntu 9.10 on a really old Dell laptop with broadcom
wifi and it works beautifully.  It is not there right after install, but
when connected wired, it hardware driver tool finds the necessary packages
and installs them with minimal effort.  You must simply agree to the
warnings about installing prorpietary crap, and it just works.  That said, I
don't believe all broadcoms are the same, so YMMV, but it is worth a shot
IMHO.  If it were me, I'd tried 10.04 first since that is long term service.

In full disclosure, this machine was rebuild for my son to use with an
Arduino board I got him for his 5th birthday, so it has not spent much time
in the "on" state. So, I can't speak explicitly to stability, but I never
had trouble keeping these Broadcoms on line once they were on.


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

Awe, shucks. =)  Also, I think that same thread lists several very cheap USB
wifi options that just work in Linux.  You can find a nice list of them some
where on wiki.ubuntu.com and I expect Fedora has something similar.
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