Installer says I'd need a wireless firmware, but WLAN works without it out of the box
- by unor
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?)