HOWTO: Use b43 driver with 14e4:4315 (Broadcom bcm4312 rev 01)

[chenxiaolong]

The b43 driver has the monitor mode feature, which isn't useful unless you go around the neighborhood cracking peoples' WEP networks. For the LED issue, are you using an HP? I'm pretty sure HP has a modification in the Windows driver for the wlan card because that was the case on my mom's HP laptop.

[georg.65]

Hi chenxiaolong,

I'm here again,

i've the same problem with my small netbook lenovo s10-2 to install the b43 driver, still the broadcom bcm4312.

Here is the output

orion@orion-laptop:~$ lspci -vnn | grep 14e4
02:00.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g [14e4:4315] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:04b5]

It looks a little different with the subsystem.

I'm runnig the command from your post

sudo apt-get install linux-backports-modules-karmic b43-fwcutter
when I would like to activate the b43 driver i cant't do it, i'm doing the same commands, it must be something with this

Subsystem: Broadcom Corporation Device [14e4:04b5]

For my Compaq notebook where you do it for me everythink works very well.

thanks georg

[leorolla]

No, mine is an Acer Aspire One D 150.

You know how I can get LED working?

Thanks!

[chenxiaolong]

Georg.65, could you try running these command and then restart the computer?

sudo rmmod b43 ssb wl
sudo depmod -a

And leorolla, the wireless LED not working is a known problem in the latest linux kernel. According to some research, the only distros it worked on was Fedora 9 and Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid.

[georg.65]

Here is the output

orion@orion-laptop:~$ sudo rmmod b43 ssb wl
[sudo] password for orion:
ERROR: Module wl does not exist in /proc/modules
orion@orion-laptop:~$ sudo depmod -a
orion@orion-laptop:~$

After i'm rebooting still can't activate b43 driver

[chenxiaolong]

Can you see if there is a :

blacklist b43

OR

blacklist ssb

in any of the files in /etc/modprobe.d/?

If so, comment it out.

[georg.65]

In /etc/modprobe.d

i d'ont found any blacklist b43 OR blacklist ssb files

only in the file blacklist.conf i found this command

blacklist bcm43xx

need to comment it out ?

[chenxiaolong]

No, leave the blacklist bcm43xx blacklisted. What I meant by my previous post was to look inside all the files in /etc/modprobe.d for blacklist b43 and blacklist ssb. If there isn't any line that says that, try running (and post the output here):

sudo modprobe b43
dmesg | grep b43

[limaunion]

hi all! I've just successfully switched from ndiswrapper to b43 after reading this thread. The only weird behaviour i'm having is that the transfer speed is quite low compared to ndiswrapper. I remenber having transfer speeds of around 20Mbps and now it hardly reaches 3Mbps under the same circunstances.

Here's some information about my network card:

04:00.0 0280: 14e4:4315 (rev 01)
Subsystem: 103c:137c

For some reason I've found that wlan0 has switched its speed
from: Bit Rate=48 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm
to: Bit Rate=1 Mb/s Tx-Power=20 dBm

Does anyone know if this a known issue ?
TIA

[chenxiaolong]

Limaunion, the speed issue is a known problem and it's going to be fixed by kernel 2.6.32.

By the way, what Windows driver did you use for ndiswrapper? It never worked for me. Also, do you mean 20 megabytes or megabits per second? I can barely get 1.5 megabytes per second with any OS or driver