Submitted by j.a.watson on February 6, 2009 - 9:23am
Ok, after a long, hard struggle, I think I have a handle on this.
First, the difference between the b43 and wl drivers. As I understand it, the b43 are open source drivers, from the OpenWrt group ( www.openwrt.org). In fact, I'm not sure that the entire driver comes from OpenWrt, but it uses firmware extracted from them. The wl drivers are proprietary, from Broadcom, and they do NOT use ndiswrapper.
The much more significant difference that I have found, after two days of testing, is the at least on my HP 2133 Mini-Note, the wl drivers work, and the b43 drivers are unreliable, at best. First, and most importantly, the wl drivers connect reliably and quickly, stay connected, and have good data transfer rates. The b43 drivers also connect, initially, but the data transfer rate seems to slow down almost immediately, and within a short time the wireless connection stops working completely, even though Network Manager, Knemo or whatever says that the connection is still ok.
Also, the wl drivers appear to be more complete than the b43 drivers. One of my routers is a Netgear Dual-Band (2.4GHz/5GHz), and I have two different SSIDs for the networks on the different bands. When I am running the wl driver, I can see both SSIDs, but when I am running the b43 router, I only see the 2.4GHz SSID.
The significance of this is somewhat less for MEPIS than for most other Linux distributions, because MEPIS comes with the wl driver installed and working - all you have to do is leave it alone, and don't be tempted to replace it with the b43 driver, at least yet. The others that I have tried (so far openSuSE, VectorLinux and Mandriva) generally come with no Broadcom wireless driver installed, and you have to go looking and decide what to install for yourself.
jw 6/2/2009
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