[was (no subject)] Wireless in F11

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Fri, Jun 26, 2009 at 08:24:19 -0400,
  Brian Mearns <bmearns at ieee.org> wrote:
> 
> But I digress. I'm guessing the problem will not magically solve
> itself just by installing F11, but I can't say for sure. I think
> certain wireless devices just aren't supported in Linux yet, but if
> you already had it working in another distro, then that's probably not
> the issue. Personally, I've only tried a few different wireless

Broadcom is bad because not only do they not help with the kernel drivers,
they have restrictions on distribution of the firmware that drivers need
to load into the device.

This is from the linux wireless project web page for b43:
The Broadcom wireless chip needs software, called "firmware", that runs on the
wireless chip itself during operation. This firmware is copyrighted by Broadcom
and it must be extracted from Broadcom's proprietary drivers. To get such
firmware on your system, you must download the driver from a legal distribution
point, as noted below. Then you must extract the firmware from that Broadcom
driver by using b43-fwcutter (or bcm43xx-fwcutter) and install it in the
special directory for firmware - usually /lib/firmware. Please note that the
firmware from the binary drivers is Copyrighted by Broadcom Corporation and
must not be redistributed.

There is some free, reverse engineered, firmware for broadcom chips, but I
think it is still considered experimental.