[ug-glug] opensolaris and wifi

[Eric Boutilier]

On Mon, 28 Apr 2008, Frank Pittel wrote:
> I've recently decided to break open the piggy bank and
> got a Dell laptop. It's an XPS M1530 with as memory serves
> broadcom 4312 wifi adaptor. I was thinking of loading opensolaris
> on it but would only be interested in doing so if there was a chance
> of getting wifi to work. How is opensolaris about working on laptops
> and wifi?
>
> Frank
>

Conventional wisdom is to avoid Broadcom I'm afraid. You can get it to
work with "NDIS wrapper" technology and maybe other methods, but I
personally don't think it's worth it. FWIW, the last I heard, Atheros
was the most popular chipset among opensolaris laptop users. But there
are other good options, e.g. I use the wpi driver for the Intel 3945
Chipset that's in my Sun-issue Sony Vaio.

But most importantly, the canonical site for laptop wifi is here:
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/laptop/wireless/

Eric