Final solution to Broadcom wireless on Linux

By apexwm, 20 September, 2010 13:29

Recently around September 9th, it was announced that Broadcom was finally going to open up the source code for its drivers of its wireless chipsets to the Linux community. This is a huge step in the right direction. As many have pointed out for a long time now, getting wireless to work with some Linux distributions has been tricky. The reason for this trouble all along has been that Broadcom's own wireless drivers were still proprietary. Therefore, many distributions have been leaving the drivers out by default, which has forced end users to manually install them. There have also been drivers that were built from scratch and reverse engineered.

Having the real drivers opened up finally will greatly help operability of Broadcom wireless chipsets with all Linux distributions with newer kernels. Broadcom chipsets are quite common now in a wide variety of laptops. So, I'm guessing that we should hopefully see the reports of wireless issues on Linux start to dwindle moving forward with newer Linux releases. Plans are already in place to integrate the drivers into the Linux kernel.

The reason for Broadcom's move is still unknown, but many have speculated that it's due to the increasing number of Linux installations that are appearing now. And, I highly suspect Broadcom wants to more evenly compete with Intel, whose products have very good Linux support.

Talkback

As someone who has spent many happy hours trying to install wireless drivers on Linux, I think it is a shame that people will be forced to have their hardware work for them out of the box. Is there an opt-out option? ;)
Jake Rayson 20 September, 2010 15:46
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