Photo courtesy of iStockphoto, Stephen Morris
Since the days of diskette-based installation, Linux on the desktop has grown and matured so fast that in most cases, it is even the desktop of choice, i.e., no more dual-booting with Windows. On the laptop, however, there are still several quirks that need to be addressed before it becomes as easy to install and configure as a desktop.
One such issue is wifi device driver. Don't get me wrong but wifi device manufacturers are now providing support for Linux, but in some cases, the drivers are often delayed… significantly.
Take case of the Broadcom chip, which is one of the few popular wifi devices built in notebooks today, it is only recently that they have released an update to their drivers. While the modern Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu 8.10, will have it pre-installed, you may want to download it and install it yourself. There are two versions, 32 bit and 64 bit, but be sure that you also read the README.
Thanks, Broadcom for releasing this. WiFi configuration just became a tad easier to do.