Good morning,
I am running Haiku on an older Win8 era Dell laptop, with the BCM43142 wireless chip.
Can someone please point me to a tutorial to help me get this up and running?
Buy a cheap supported USB wifi dongle. Use the search function in the top right corner to look or user reports about working and supported hw.
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I’ll be okay with ethernet then. It’s an older Dell laptop, without a battery, so it isn’t portable anyway, and wifi would have been nice, but not entirely necessary.
Using Broadcom wireless lan (wlan) cards on anything other than Windows has always been a bit thorny afaik.
Even on recent Linux distributions (and probably the *BSD family as well) it is necessary to actually have BOTH the proprietary firmware and a suitable driver package. And that’s an improvement given that you used to have use ndiswrapper along with the Windows driver…
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx
See the linked page on Ubuntu’s help wiki for the details of getting it working under Ubuntu…
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I have a Dell Latitude E1505 from 2005 that boots x86 and everything works except for the bcm4311 wlan. Hmmm. 17 years old and it’s still proprietary? I understand that you can’t redistribute things without a license but then how does Linux get around this issue? Perhaps we can have drivers that load the binary module the way that Linux does.
Edit: I think this thread answers this:
I myself am probably going to use a small Wi-Fi dongle for my MacBook with broadcom 4331. However, I do want to try and figure the onboard Wi-Fi out, and the usb Wi-Fi is a temporary solution for anyone. I think an important goal would be expanding hardware support, because the current hardware supported is quite limited.
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