A great reply to a Broadcom chipset user.

This was a fantastic reply to a Broadcom chipset user complaining about kernel panics on his old laptop!

"Hi,

Can't you just buy a better mini pci wifi card that is properly supported ?
Avoid using ndiswrapper, it will course kernel panic such as what your getting..

Regards,
Edward."

The user then goes on to complain about not wanting to spend any money on the laptop.

Which James came out with a perfect reply which I will probley have to reuse in the future;

"Apparently you fail to understand that Broadcom cards are not supported
by Broadcom due to internal policy and frivolous control restraints they
feel they need to put on everyone. It's not any system's fault for not
supporting Broadcom, they will not provide documentation for developers
to write anything decent, so is it any coincidence that it causes
systems to crash? Employing an interpreter for Windows drivers due to
Broadcom's deaf ears is a stop-gap measure but hardly qualifies as the
way to ensure yourself a good experience with a system as you've said
have not used until now. Such a small investment will save your hours of
problems with the OS, plus the bonus that you save time from not fixing
Windows problems, like the mundane and time consuming defragmentation
due to bad file system design or cleanup of redundant files, registry
garbage or update backups.

Do yourself a favor it's $10-15 (Nothing considering the devalued US
dollar), get an Atheros or Intel wireless card off eBay, there's quite a
few supported by OpenSolaris. There's a list under the laptop community
for wireless cards and their respective chip set, as Atheros and Intel,
like NVIDIA are merely the ones that write the specification, not the
fabricators. (At least not to consumers typically) They work with
Windows (Obviously) but as an added bonus if OpenSolaris doesn't work
out for you, you have a card that'll work well with the other
alternatives too! (FreeBSD and Linux) "

The moral of this story is, Don't wast your time/days over something that cost 15$ and is usually better hardware in any case.

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