2011 Macbook Pro: State of linux wireless support

Want to use your favorite operating system of your favorite laptop?


The 2011 Macbook Pro uses a Broadcom 4331 chipset for which there exists no driver at this point. And according to the Ubuntu forums NDISwrapper does not work either.

However Broadcom states that:

"We have plans to support the BCM4331, and other new chips, with the
brcmsmac driver. I don't have an ETA, but new chip support is the first
thing on the priority list after getting the brcmsmac driver out of staging."


Also there are also community efforts to create a driver and today one kernel-hacker told me:

"Hey, the work has just started and its really hard as we don't have ANY specs. Everything I write is from dumps without knowing real stuct of the driver. There is a lot if guessing, starring at the dumps and trying to find a relation with specs for older cards.

I'm on vacations right more, I expect to perform first tests in 2-4 weeks, do then ill be able to tell you more."


So all one can do at the moment seems to be buying an wifi-stick (which sucks, since the macbook wifi was four antennas and should provide a really nice connectivity) or wait.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Help me to improve support texts

Hi, under the hood the wizard now is quite finished. But as I'm not a native English speaker I need your help at improving the support texts given inside the wizard. They are, as Robert stated a bit to formal and stiff. I really would be glad if some of you could have a look at the wiki page , where you can edit the texts.
Read more

Workshop Project: Hot Wire Anemometer

Image
I just want to present my project I built as an own project in the electronics workshop hold at my university, that really has been quite interesting. Its a so called "Hot Wire Anemometer" (Airflow-meter). Here you have the explanation as an excerpt of the project documentation: Die Idee beim Hitzdrahtanemometer ist den Wärmeverlust an einem Glühfaden zu bestimmen und dadurch auf die Geschwindigkeit des kühlenden Luftstroms zu schließen. Um den Wärmeverlust messen zu können wird die Widerstand – Temperatur Abhängigkeit des Glühdraht benutzt um diesen auf einer konstanten Temperatur also Widerstand zu halten. Schließlich wird der dazu notwendige Strom, bzw der Spannungsabfall am Glühdraht gemessen, verstärkt und ausgewertet. Although we had a bunch of problems in the end everything worked very well and was a nice combination on analog and digital elements. As a hot wire we used a 6V light bulb where we took off the glass.
Read more

Dry-Ice Canon fun

Image
Use frozen carbon dioxide (dry ice), mix it with water and pipe the steam into a PET bottle. When the bottle at roughly 22bar explodes you can shoot for example a toy chicken over more than 80 meters (We had serious problems to build a projectile that is not destroyed by the power of the launch). We built the device for a creativity competition at our university. And well, we could not place an object accurate on 20m but for shure we did it with the biggest impact. Music on Amazon and iTunes If you are curious, here some detail about the construction: For us secure handling was not only an option. We have seen some people that put water and dry-ice together into an bottle close it and put it into a pipe. But you have good chances that it will explode in your hands. So we put an PET bottle into our pipe and connect it with an CNC made adapter to the presure reservoir outside. Beside that, all parts are made from steel and welded. We experienced that a 1.5l coke bottle (actually we used
Read more