[Assist] BCM4313 [14e4:4727] with libre linux

[Jorge Araya Navarro]

> Dear Help,
> 
> currently I'm an Arch Linux user and I would like to free my Arch
> Linux to Parabola.
> 
> But I'm afraid that my wireless will stop working afterwards, and that
> would be very bad, because atm I only can use wireless, if it breaks,
> it will be very uncomfortable to fix it...
> 
> I have a broadcom chip:
> Broadcom Corporation BCM4313 802.11b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller
> [14e4:4727] (rev 01)
> 
> which works perfectly fine with brcmsmac in Arch Linux. But as far as
> I know brcmsmac uses proprietary firmware. So it's not included in
> your kernel version, right?
> 
> I know that one can use openfwwf with b43 in principal, but b43
> doesn't support my chip as far as I know.
> 
> So, is there a way to run Parabola on this netbook, or will
> linux-libre break my wireless?
> 
> Thanks,
> Julia

hello, Julia!

Looks like your wifi card doesn't work with linux-libre[1], which is the
kernel for all libre distributions of GNU/Linux. The driver code is
under GNU GPL but there is a binary blob, that's kind suspicious, I
recommend you to buy a wifi card which respect your freedom (and less
suspicious!), here is a list of wifi cards which works with
Linux-Libre[2] that list just show cards of PCI type, because looks like
your card isn't a PCI-Express or a MiniPCI either (but, is better you
paste what lspci -nn | grep Ethernet shows, just to be sure).

If you install Parabola or another free software distribution, your wifi
card won't be broken, it just will stop working :)

cheers! 

[1]
http://www.h-node.org/wifi/view/en/201/-Broadcom-Corporation-BCM4313-802-11b-g-n-
[2]
http://www.h-node.org/wifi/catalogue/en/1/1/undef/undef/yes/PCI/alphabetically/undef
-- 

Jorge Araya Navarro
Universitario, idealista y pseudo-activista del Software Libre.
Siquirres, Limón, Costa Rica.
http://swt.encyclomundi.net
Diaspora*: http://diasp.org/u/shackra
identi.ca: http://parlementum.net/sweet
Jabber: shackra at jabberes.org
Skype: ¡De ninguna manera, tras de privativo, te espían!.
el software privativo en GNU/Linux, al igual que en Windows o en MacOs,
te hace un ser no-libre. Deja de engañarte, 
¡¡despierta ahora!!:
http://www.gnu.org/distros/free-distros.html
http://replicant.us/about/

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