[wuug-list] [wuug-forum] Gh0st_Pirate: lol, anyone ever had to deal with bcm43xx-fwcutter before?

[Matt Draisey]

On Sat, 2008-01-19 at 23:17 -0500, Matthew Johnston wrote:
> 
> I just went through a royal pain in the arse with a Dell inspiron 1521
> using that same chip.
> I tried everything, from ndiswrapper, Ubuntu repos, compile
> everything, and even recompile my kernel just to try and get it to
> work.  Lots of forums I went on claimed to get it to work, but I never
> could.  I gave up and am installing XP back on it.

Just googled to see what everyone was talking about.  Yuck.

I use wifi inside the house between the computer and the dsl box which
is tucked away upstairs.  An small external wifi bridge was my
preemptive workaround for miserable hardware.  Less effective on a
laptop though!

You have to wonder about a legal regime that says that these firmware
blobs, without which the hardware is useless and in any other context is
just gibberish, can have their distribution controlled by a copyright
holder.  You'd think just selling the hardware would nullify any claim.
It would be so much easier if these things just lived in the driver.

Matt