Broadcom Drivers and Blacklisting

[sfeinst]

I have a Lenovo laptop I am playing around with.  It currently has Windows installed, no Linux.  It uses Broadcom chipset for wireless.  I decided to try out some live CDs to see if any worked with the machine OOTB.  I tried 3 distros including PCLOS.  Only PCLOS worked with the wireless.  The other two did not.  They both seemed to have an issue related to a blacklist file which prevented the Broadcom drivers from loading.

What I was wondering was if anyone was familiar with the blacklisting of the drivers and if this was something I might need to worry about with PCLOS in the future.  From what I can tell, the other distros are Debian based.  So I wasn't sure if the blacklisting was related to how Debian was handling conflicting drivers.  Or, if the blacklisting was because of an issue with a kernel version and down the road, if PCLOS used that kernel, then I would run into the same issue.

Thanks for any insights.

[gseaman]

If it currently works, you don't need to worry. The only time I recall when blacklisting is necessary is when more than one driver exists for a specific piece of hardware and the built in hardware detection routine insists on re-selecting the wrong driver. If this has been solved for your particular hardware it is very unlikely to re-occur.

Galen

[sfeinst]

If it currently works, you don't need to worry. The only time I recall when blacklisting is necessary is when more than one driver exists for a specific piece of hardware and the built in hardware detection routine insists on re-selecting the wrong driver. If this has been solved for your particular hardware it is very unlikely to re-occur.

Galen

Thanks for the info.  That is what I was hoping to hear.

[muungwana]

FYI,
you blacklist a module by adding its name in "/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist" text file.

The format should be apparent if the text file has an entry in it.

you can look at the file to see what modules are already blacklisted