https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=801681
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=801681#c6
Larry Finger changed:
What |Removed |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Status|NEW |RESOLVED
Resolution| |INVALID
--- Comment #6 from Larry Finger 2013-03-06 15:57:01 UTC ---
This is not a bug.
Broadcom's rules prevent anyone from redistributing their firmware files.
Fortunately, many of their drivers such as wl, those for Windows, and the code
used in access points build the firmware into the driver. Linux rules prevent
this.
The script '/usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware', which is included in the
distro, downloads one of these foreign drivers and extracts the firmware into a
form that Linux uses. This process is totally legal. Of course, this is a
chicken-and-egg problem as you need the network to install the firmware, but
there is no wireless without it.
One workaround is to backup the files in /lib/firmware/b43/ from an working
system onto a USB stick or CD, and then use that backup as the source of the
necessary files for a new installation.
I do not know what Fedora does; however, all distros are forbidden to
distribute the firmware. Perhaps they ignore that prohibition, which I doubt,
or they might include one of those foreign drivers so that the firmware can be
extracted without having an active network. The downside is that one must
include about 12 MB of stuff in order to extract 0.5 MB of what is needed. As
the openSUSE developers are always fighting the problem of releases that are
too large for the media, that does not seem like the way to go. As you may have
noted, the 12.3 live media are now 900 MB, much too large for a CD, and the RC2
DVD iso would not fit on DVD+R media.
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