Linux PCI Wireless cards (and the bcm43xx driver)

It's a pain in the butt when manufacturers of PCI wireless cards don't release a driver to go with their hardware. Case in point: broadcom, whose card I purchased. Luckily, there is a hacked driver available from the community.

Links:

• Ubuntu docs wireless troubleshooting guide -- very good
• Ubuntu docs guide for using the bcm43xx class of cards
• Another (worse) guide for bcm's

Note to self: whatever I do, do NOT use ndiswrapper for wireless drivers. All the kernel hackers tell me it's bad... and, they were right. I believe it attempts to load the Windows driver on top of a layer that enables the cooperation of the hardware and the Windows driver. When I tried to use it, it crashed GNOME. Grrr...

The jury's out on whether this actually works or not (I have yet to get this desktop in range of a usable wireless signal) but I can iwlist eth0 scan for stuff and get results back so I'm optimistic...

Update: this thing works (most of the time). Sometimes it will inexplicably lose the signal and I'll have to connect again. Not the biggest deal in the world, but still pretty annoying.