Wireless hoops

It's been so long since I scratch-installed Linux on my work-laptop that I had forgotten the pain in the arse it can be to get the wireless working.  Not that the steps are necessarily hard nor that the howto's are that difficult to find; it's the frustration and anger when you try one recipe after the next that result in failure until magically something works.

I realise now how many problems I may potentially have avoided by putting Linux in a virtualbox on my personal laptop, where wireless is simply not an issue (all internet bridges to the ethernet port from the host).  In fact there's something to be said for virtualbox essentially standardizing all the hardware such that they are not a consideration.  I know it's been theorized and toyed with but I now think about how nice it could be if there were no real host (only a host shell that handles the hardware) and all OS's were in a virtual machine.  The nearest I can figure for that would be an extremely stripped down Linux, but then Linux doesn't have the most complete set of problem-free device drivers in the first place doesn't it?

Anyhow, this time, the fix I have to remember can be found (among other places) here, with the key novel steps being:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get --reinstall install bcmwl-kernel-source