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

[chenxiaolong]

Sorry, I misread that page. I guess the b43-fwcutter and the firmware is newer. Anyway, in Jaunty, I could never get compat-wireless to compile.

[raikou]

Sorry, I misread that page. I guess the b43-fwcutter and the firmware is newer. Anyway, in Jaunty, I could never get compat-wireless to compile.

I see.

Well lastnight I made some progress.
I upgraded to Karmic but my display was not working.
This was fixed by adding i915.mode=0 onto the kernel line in one of the boot options in grub.

After booting into 9.10, 2.6.31-17, I managed to install the b43 driver and have wlan0 show up as my wireless device.
I can see networks in managed mode, however I cannot connect to them (it begins to connect but then disconnects).

As a side note, Kismet is also now working which means that I am able to switch my card into monitor mode, which is great.
However it can't pick up any networks including my own one at home, but a wired connection works.

Did you have the same problem?

[chenxiaolong]

No, mine is working fine (except when too much bandwith is being used). Are you installing the b43 driver that you compiled in the previous kernel, or did you recompile it. Right now, I'm using the Ubuntu-packaged version of compat-wireless (linux-backports-modules-karmic), but I'll test the linuxwireless.org version and see how it goes.

[raikou]

i used b43-fwcutter for the driver I think, if that is what it infact does :\

[chenxiaolong]

Which version of compat-wireless did you download? I downloaded the compat-wireless-2009-12-11.tar.gz version and it doesn't compile for me.

[raikou]

Which version of compat-wireless did you download? I downloaded the compat-wireless-2009-12-11.tar.gz version and it doesn't compile for me.

After installing Karmic I simply used the instructions at the top of the first post of this thread, I didn't get compat-wireless drivers involved (that I know of)
however I do have a compat-wireless-2009-12-11.tar.gz on my desktop that i was trying to use in Jaunty.
Does this now work in Karmic? If not, which version of compat-wireless should I go get?

[chenxiaolong]

The compat-wireless-2009-12-11.tar.gz does NOT work in either Jaunty or Karmic. If you followed my directions in my first post, you don't need compat-wireless at all. It should work.

[raikou]

The compat-wireless-2009-12-11.tar.gz does NOT work in either Jaunty or Karmic. If you followed my directions in my first post, you don't need compat-wireless at all. It should work.

Ah...
I think the reason it hasn't worked for me was because it never asked me "Do you want to fetch the firmware"
Because i've installed it before in Jaunty.
How do I get the fwcutter to run through the set up again to fetch the firmware?

[chenxiaolong]

You have to remove or rename these folders (apt-get will download them again):

/lib/firmware/b43
/lib/firmware/b43legacy

Then run sudo apt-get remove --purge b43-fwcutter or select Completely Remove for b43-fwcutter in Synaptic.

Then install b43-fwcutter again and it will ask you if you want to fetch the firmware.

[amigec]

I installed Xubuntu 9.10 and b43-fwcutter package in Synaptic and it asked me to fetch a firmware, I selected yes and restarted. First time it couldn't boot so I reset my laptop and second time boot was successful. But when there's not wlan0 device in ifconfig and when i type lspci -v under BCM4312 it says
Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
Kernel Modules: ssb
I blacklisted ssb module but its always in use. What to do?