Therefore one must discover which card was installed in the machine and use the manufacturer's firmware for it.
Part of the problem is that incorporating the drivers in de distributions is difficult when Apple won't deliver specifics on them. The Broadcom networkcards used by Apple are not standard recognized items on linux. This is a standard issue for anybody running linux on Apple. There's a whole topic on it on the Ubuntu community forum.
When running linux on an Apple machine, you'll have to install the drivers for wifi by hand. One thing I noticed is that the wireless isn't working in ubuntu but I'm pretty sure when I was setting up OSX when installed it on the 250gb HDD that the wifi worked so I think it's just a ubuntu thing. UPDATE: I booted up ubuntu off a USB and that's working so that appears to me to indicate the rest of the hardware is working fine. Keep in mind, this 250gb drive had OSX installed on it, then files from the SSD migrated over onto it and then it wouldn't load into the OS, that's as far as it's ever gotten. The most I've got at the moment is the 250gb drive in has the apple logo with a dotted circle loading that keeps going, nothing happens. SO, is my disc drive screwed? Is there anyway to just get the laptop to boot into OSX? I can live without the disc drive I guess. It'll let me push the disc most of the way and then it'll pull it in most of the rest of the way but then decides to spit it back out partially where it just gets stuck. The macbook still won't boot, and now It won't let a disc in. Trying to push it back in didn't help so I kind of just ripped it out. I read that holding down eject when starting the laptop would force eject it. I tried to eject the OSX installation disc and nothing happened. I then read something about putting the applications disc in to run some hardware check to see if it could determine a problem.
I left it for a while thinking it might be loading or something but nothing ever happened. Next it wanted to continue on and I let it and it said everything was ready and then I just got a blank grey screen which I could move the mouse over. I installed snow leopard onto the new HDD and it asked if I wanted to migrate stuff from an old Mac volume so I plugged into the SSD using a sata to usb adapter and it actually saw it and transferred everything on. Next, I try putting in the old 250gb hdd that came with the macbook which also appears to work fine.
I could move the mouse but couldn't click on or do anything. I put it back in my macbook and tried booting it dozens of times, a couple of times it actually saw the SSD and booted into OSX and showed the desktop but then just seemed to 'freeze'. I plugged it into my desktop computer and it sees it just fine so the SSD appears to be okay.
So my macbook from 2010 stopped recognising my 128gb samsung 830 series SSD.