For a bit now the kernel has been yelling at me on the console that it could not find or load some firmware file. Then it dawned on me bcm stands for Broadcom and Fedora magically had drivers after one of the updates. After getting the ASUS window driver files and compiling fwcutter to cut out the firmware, the kernel stopped complaining and NetworkManager started listing a bunch of networks in the area. I used the ASUS drivers because they came in a zip package. The Compaq drivers were in a .exe softpack and I didn’t have Windows or Wine around to get at the firmware inside. Now all that is needed is for vendors to start allowing Linux distributions to ship firmware and we could have a much better wireless story. Kudos to the bcm4xx project for writing the drivers and the Linux Broadcom 4301 Driver Project which cleanroom reverse engineered the drivers.

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