Raspberry Pi drivers open sourced – first ARM-based SoC with native open source drivers

who are open sourcing drivers.

I had to struggle with broadcom wireless drivers recently. In that I needed a network connection to load the wireless drivers to establish a network connection, to load the wireless drivers - no cable network being available - this presented quite a problem.

Fortunately I had a dongle for the right service provider, and was able to use the SIM card from the wifi/broadband router in the dongle to get the relevant drivers loaded.

Broadcom wireless drivers are Open Source and are included in most distros nowadays. The big issue is the required firmware, which remains proprietary. Broadcom permits redistribution of their firmware and some distros take advantage of that. On such distros (i.e.: Fedora, Gentoo) Broadcom wireless works after install with no muss or fuss. Others, like Ubuntu, download the firmware as part of the installation process if they detect a Broadcom chip that requires it. Unfortunately there are still a whole lot of distros that refuse to touch proprietary firmware or just don't include the Broadcom firmware for whatever reason and that's when you run into the very issue you describe.

I always take the firmware off to a USB stick before installing a distro that I am not sure will support Broadcom wireless on my netbook. It's not dependent on a specific version of the kernel (or much of anything else) so it will transfer cleanly from one distro to another.

This was an Ubuntu based distro. The Mageia install on the same machine worked flawlessly (asin the Wifi worked from the live CD), as did the ROSA install. The Ubuntu install required a network before I could establish a wifi network.

I think this is about the GPU, not the wireless.

No it's about Broadcom.