I came across an article on the Internet describing the latest version of Elementary OS (based on Ubuntu). It looked like it would be nice to try on my Dell Inspiron 1300 laptop (Pentium M, 2GB memory, 250GB HDD).
I first tried the Additional Drivers in the Settings app. Unfortunately, this only caused an error during install and when I tried to fix it with apt-get --configure -a, the result was a kernel panic.
Here is a link to the web site I used here to fix this problem. Seems to work after rebooting. I do not know if I will have to re-install after every kernel update or not. I do not think that will be necessary.
Here is a quick summary of the solution:
To fix the problem run the following commands:$ sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter$ wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2$ tar xf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2 $ cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/$ sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware/ wl_apsta_mimo.o$ sudo modprobe b43$ sudo echo "b43" >> /etc/modules
