Sometimes I just gotta wonder about GNU/Linux and wi-fi...Maybe you can help.

I don't get it. I had a BCM38xx wireless LAN card. I bought it because I saw decent reviews on getting it working under GNU/Linux. Well, let's just say it was fun, but not real fun, and leave it at that, eh? The odd thing was, I was using Ubuntu on the laptop at that point, and PCLinuxOS auto-detected and configured the wireless PCI version I bought for one of the desktops.Go figure.

So I went shopping. This time I set out to find a card with a libre driver that would work with GNU/Linux. So I got the Edimax card - it was advertised by Linux Emporium as working with Debian Etch "out of the box" (though now it just says "works reliably" with Etch). I did get it working, but nothing like out of the box. It worked fine at home, but I could never get it to detect the open wireless system at work, like my home LAN was the only thing in existence.

Recently, I've been toying with different distros on the laptop, playing with gNewSense-KDE and Debian Lenny. Turns out, gNewsense gets my wi-fi card (with the libre drivers) working, while Debian Lenny doesn't even see it (yeah, same card with libre drivers) at all. Bear in mind that gNewSense is based on Ubuntu, which, in turn, is based on Debian. I honestly don't get it.

If you get it, please help me understand, because I confess to being totally lost. The drivers are libre. They have been available for some time now. The standard line about GNU/Linux systems and hardware is that the drivers are not libre. Yet, here we have libre drivers, and the appropriate kernel devs, distro devs or whomever, still can't seem to make a networking card function properly.

I don't know where the problem lies. I don't know who is to blame. How does one distro get it right, but the parent distro (with the great reputation) get it wrong? That means it cannot be the kernel devs, because the device works, just not out of the box on certain distros. Bear in mind that networking has always been GNU/Linux' forté.

Look, all I'm saying is, I can just picture a suit, or just some regular Joe, trying out GNU/Linux, and running into this issue. I honestly don't think there is much excuse for not having something working properly and out of the box when you have the blooming drivers. Will someone please help me find a clue? And, no I really don't want to hear about how to compile the drivers from source. I want to know why something that should "just work" doesn't.

Note: I could have misread the Linux Emporium site way back then, but it appears to have changed since.