Comment 42 for bug 184600

Thanks guys. It's great to know that this patch will be in this backports module available for Hardy. It does solve the problem for me personally, since I'll add the ppa to my repositories list, and will install the new package from Tim as soon as it is available. I'm still concerned about the sheer number of laptop users that have broadcom chipsets that are affected by this. Adding unsigned code from a ppa repository is not a new trick for me, but it certainly is less friendly than desired for new Ubuntu users. Since Intrepid is obviously using 2.6.26 (or greater), this only affects Hardy or earlier distributions. Officially, I believe Dapper Dan (which was a LTS release), Fiesty Fawn, and Gutsy Gibbon are still supported, so that means they are affected as well. Does this mean we should add these to the affects list? I believe the compat-wireless pack is for all kernels >= 2.6.22 or above, and that the developers plan on supporting all the way back to 2.6.18. I kind of skipped Edgy Eft and Fiesty Fawn, so I dont' know which distributions use which kernels. I did use Gutsy Gibbon, and it was 2.6.24, so it falls into this category. It becomes a moot point if there aren't any affected users.

It seems to me that almost every current AMD-based laptop on the market is using broadcom wireless chipsets, and the Intel based ones are using Intel wireless chipsets to get the logo compliance they need for those nifty little stickers like "Centrino inside". So one of my concerns is that the solution still seems difficult for new linux/Ubuntu users, and that it can hurt in winning over market share for linux/debian/Ubuntu, etc.

Still having it in a maintained repository (even a PPA one), is better than requiring people to compile, and takes away the work for most of us when we the kernel abi gets bumped for a security fix. So thanks again, guys!!!