Since I don't suffer from having such cruft being built into my mobile, I can't relate, except for previous experience I've had with Broadcom's older 4000 series wireless G cards. Extracting firmware and using a very badly coded wrapper is the method, it's hardly reliable. I'd disable the card and opt for a cardbus or expresscard if I ever had to deal with their crap again and had no option to get rid of the whole unit in its entirety. Any vendor that bundles Broadcom and gives no alternate option needs to be boycotted so they themselves refuse to support such a shoddy vendor.
One good example is Apple these days, we all thought they were making good by integrating NVIDIA in their mobiles for the first time, they still do thankfully, but the Atheros chipset used in most of the MacBook Pro's, basically Jan 2006-September 2007 are no longer used in the latest units with 2.5ghz+ Core 2 CPU's. If they fail to deliver an option I will not be upgrading, unless mini-PCI is an option, which it wouldn't be due to vertical lock-in of drivers and lack of competition (I'm not sure if they actually use the slot anyways). I am not for or against their hardware or software integration, I just at times prefer what they do to what Dell, HP, and Acer have been doing in terms of quality, and their OS is more productive for what I do than any free system like Linux or OpenSolaris (Which are quite pathetic for a lot of line-of-business purposes), but that doesn't detract from the problems that stem, even on their own integrated system, from using Broadcom. Again, it's time for the consumer, technical or not to be aware of the use of Broadcom, and to boycott companies who chose to force it upon the consumer without decent options. Broadcom will never change, we know this, and they have no clue why their shares are always changing, but the reason is their hardware is shoddy, they stick to 1980's mentality with commonplace technology, and is with many US companies these days, they fear losing out against diverse companies, it's natural selection here these type of companies are certainly on the way out, whether they know it or not. Let's hope they sink like the titanic, and it'll only happen if people boycott companies who give no options. Voice your concern by bringing their stocks down enough for non-technical CIO/CEO/CFO/CTO's to get a clue. James On May 11, 2008, at 10:40 AM, Ben Taylor wrote: > Kaiwai Gardiner wrote: >> On Sun, 2008-05-11 at 01:37 -0500, James Cornell wrote: >> >>> Tried the ndis method? >>> >> >> Yeah, he has - its problematic anyway; he's probably better off just >> throwing in the towel and getting a wireless PCMCIA card. >> > Having been through the ndis wringer several times with > my HP laptop and a broadcom wifi NIC, I can relate. Up > until recently, even the PCMCIA port was not usable > but that's recently gotten a fix. (And atheros mini-pci > is not an option as HP whitelist's the adapters that > can work, otherwise no POST). > > I have built and rebuilt ndisbcm several times, with different > Windows drivers. For whatever reason, each version > of SXCE and ndiswrappers has needed something different. > My last build (b85 I think) actually worked with the HP > windows drivers, which had not worked in previous versions. > It really is voodoo sometimes.... > > Ben > >> Matthew >> >> >>> James >>> On May 11, 2008, at 1:00 AM, Nick wrote: >>> >>> >>>> Initially yes, i used it mainly for school in order to develop with >>>> MASM and VisualC++, now my needs have changed and Solaris is the >>>> operating system i have chosen. >>>> >>>> Anyways, does anyone else have advice on how to get my wireless >>>> card >>>> to recognize my wireless network? >>>> >>>> >
