[OpenIndiana-discuss] OpenIndiana Drivers For My Wireless Network Device

[jay]

Esteemed Colleagues,

Yesterday I booted my new laptop (well, new to me) from the latest
hipster iso, intending to proceed immediately therefrom to an
installation.  I noticed, alas, that the system had no knowledge of my
wireless network device.  This makes the system useless for my
computer, it is, after all, a laptop, it is a portable device that on
occasion literally sits atop my lap, it has to be able to connect to a
network without there being an Ethernet cable stuck into it.  The
Device Driver Utility (or whatever it's called, I don't have it on the
screen anymore, otherwise I would be running OpenIndiana and would
therefore be unable to send this e-mail) noted, correctly, the
existence of a

  Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY

but it had no driver for it.

I have installed both LinuxMint and OpenSUSE on this computer, and in
both cases, having previously placed the Broadcom drivers and the
b43-fwcutter program in an accessible area, I was able to use
b43-fwcutter to place the drivers into /lib/firmware, and then these
Linux systems were able to see my wireless device.

OpenIndiana, it seems to me, should be able to do something similar.
It cannot be that Openindiana has a problem with closed-source
drivers, because the first thing I see when the X Window System comes
up, for a split-second, is the Nvidia logo, visible proof that
closed-source drivers are welcome in OpenIndiana.  So what is the
procedure for making the drivers for my laptop's wireless device
available to OpenIndiana, so I can install them, first on the
installation environment, and then on the installed OS?  I have a zfs
filesystem (thank you, ZOL) that can be used for communication between
my Linux systems and an OpenIndiana system (or FreeBSD, but FreeBSD
also understands ext2 and LVM).  Thank you in advance for any and all
replies.

                        Jay F. Shachter
                        6424 N Whipple St
                        Chicago IL  60645-4111
                                (1-773)7613784   landline
                                (1-410)9964737   GoogleVoice
                                jay at m5.chicago.il.us
                                http://m5.chicago.il.us

                        "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur"