Linux Distro with Broadcom support?
I'm trying to find a Linux distro for my netbook that has 'out of the box' support for broadcom 4315 wireless device. Just last month Broadcom opened up their source code so I'm hoping that there is a distro with it built in. I don't want to mess with ndiswrapper or installing any other programs. I'm not well versed in Linux so I'm trying to keep it simple. I've tried searching for a distro but I've not found one that comes right out and says "supports broadcom 4315". I've read that Mint *may* support it, but then I'm not sure if Mint would be a good choice for a netbook. Thanks for your advice!
Comments
Right now to get support for Broadcom drivers you still need to be or own a Computer Geek. Broadcom released the SOURCE CODE for their driver. It is available for download from kernel.org as is most of the Linux kernel, but Linus Torvalds reportedly hasn't accepted it into the kernel yet and there is an interesting discussion going on as to whether he will (or even should). I'm running a Broadcom 4318 card using the b43 driver and some firmware I got using among other sites this as a tutorial:
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
Reportedly Ubuntu wants to install the Broadcom Driver, and they do have bw43-firmware-cutter available for download from their repositories. But it will definitely take time for Ubuntu to roll out the driver binaries, and you can only expect others to do so after they do. I'd just say be patient or see if b43 and the firmware are right for you.
Currently Mint 9 does not have out of the box support for Broadcom, Linux Mint 10 will. The distros that may have out of the install support would be Ubuntu 10.10 to my knowledge, Fedora 13 might have support after updating the kernel via system update.