Installer says I'd need a wireless firmware, but WLAN works without it out of the box

Posted by unor on Ask Ubuntu See other posts from Ask Ubuntu or by unor
Published on 2012-10-19T17:01:07Z Indexed on 2012/10/19 17:17 UTC
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12.04

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wireless

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firmware

While installing 12.04.01 (Alternate) on a netbook (Samsung N150Plus), Ubuntu informed me that I'd need the firmware brcm/bcm43xx-0.fw. I skipped this step.

If I understand this page correctly, the mentioned firmware is a WLAN driver.

However, after the Ubuntu installation was completed, the WLAN worked out of the box. After a few minutes, Ubuntu informed me that there is a firmware update available, which would be the mentioned firmware.

Do I need to install this? Is Ubuntu using some kind of "lite" WLAN driver and I might run into problems with certain networks in the future, if I don't use the firmware? Would there be benefits in using the firmware? (maybe longer runtime because of lower consumption?)

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