broadcom bcm4306 rev 3 not working in ubuntu server 10.04

[db654]

good evening ladies and gents,

I am in the process of setting up a home server and have hit a bit of a brick wall. During the installation I was notified that 'no network interfaces detected' but I carried on with the installation. The installation went fine and booted up into the o/s. There is no ethernet port on the motherboard, however I am using a wireless bcm4306 rev 3 broadcom pci card.

Now that I am logged in, how would I go about getting my wireless card working? I have followed a guide where I installed the b43-fwcutter package, downloaded the firmware and extracted the firmware to /lib/firmware and restarted pc but I'm still not getting any action from the wifi card.



Here is the output of some commands:
lspci | grep Broadcom\ Corporation
00:09.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)

iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSIDff/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff

lshw -C network
*-network
description: Network controller
product: BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller
vendor: Broadcom Corporation
physical id: 9
bus info: pci@0000:00:09.0
version: 03
width: 32 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master
configuration: driver=b43-pci-bridge latency=32
resources: irq:17 memory:dfff8000-dfff9fff
*-network DISABLED
description: Wireless interface
physical id: 1
logical name: wlan0
serial: 00:11:50:1c:31:a8
capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bg

lsmod | grep b4
b43 157827 0
mac80211 204922 1 b43
cfg80211 126517 2 b43,mac80211
led_class 2864 1 b43
ssb 37336 1 b43


Any help/info/suggestions on getting this working will be gratefully appreciated!

Cheers

[db654]

*bump*

[db654]

It appears as though I have got the card working! I'll post the steps just in case they help some one else ( I will post thorough steps just in case there is someone just starting out with ubuntu). As mentioned in my original post, I didn't have any internet access at all on my server pc- there is no onboard LAN and the wireless card in question was not working.

So on my main pc which is connected to the internet, I cracked open a terminal and downloaded the b43-fwcutter .deb package for lucid (http://packages.ubuntu.com/lucid/i38...utter/download) and saved it to my desktop for now (package filename: b43-fwcutter_012-1build1_i386.deb)

The next step was to obtain the correct firmware using info from the following site (http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Dr...b43#fw-b43-new)

The firmware required is broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5 (I am using kernel 2.6.32-21-generic-pa) so make sure in your terminal you are in the desktop area (for simplicity) and type:
wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/b...0.10.5.tar.bz2
which will download the tarball to your desktop.

Now I plugged in a USB stick to my main pc, cd'd to the desktop and placed the b43-fwcutter deb and the firmware tarball onto it. I then unplugged the usb stick and mounted it on my server pc (automount doesn't happen on the server o/s) and typed:
sudo mount -t vfat /dev/XXX] /mnt/external

[note I created a mount point in /mnt/ called external:
sudo mkdir /mnt/external ]

you can find out which device your usb is by typing:
sudo fdisk -l and place the appropriate string in the /dev/XXX expression above

so with the usb mounted, I then copied the 'b43-fwcutter_012-1build1_i386.deb' and 'broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2' to my home area. Now change directory to your home area where you just copied the files to.

I then installed the .deb package by executing:
sudo dpkg -i b43-fwcutter_012-1build1_i386.deb

and then unpacked the .tar.bz2 by executing:
sudo tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

after the unpacking finished, I then executed:
sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware ./broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/wl_apsta_mimo.o
and you should see some output in the terminal.

I then executed:
sudo ifconfig wlan0 up

and then when I exeucted
sudo iwlist wlan0 scan

I could see my SSID and the houses surrounding, success!

So now running dmesg | grep b4 , I get the following:
[ 2.274942] b43-pci-bridge 0000:00:09.0: PCI INT A -> GSI 17 (level, low) -> IRQ 17
[ 10.534412] b43-phy0: Broadcom 4306 WLAN found (core revision 5)
[ 10.856761] Registered led device: b43-phy0::tx
[ 10.856819] Registered led device: b43-phy0::rx
[ 10.856882] Registered led device: b43-phy0::radio
[ 823.524060] b43 ssb0:0: firmware: requesting b43/ucode5.fw
[ 823.543799] b43 ssb0:0: firmware: requesting b43/pcm5.fw
[ 823.557412] b43 ssb0:0: firmware: requesting b43/b0g0initvals5.fw
[ 823.571045] b43 ssb0:0: firmware: requesting b43/b0g0bsinitvals5.fw
[ 823.700058] b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10)

Now that I have the card running, I just need to figure out how to configure it to connect to my router!

Hope this helps someone!

[db654]

update:
to configure the wifi card to connect to my router, I simply installed a wpa_supplicant .deb package on the server pc and then edited the appropriate wpa_suppicant.conf and /etc/network/interfaces file.

works like a charm!

[Yum_Salad]

I tried this but just got a bunch of errors showing in the grep command at the end

[apoth]

Works for me... for 30 seconds, then it goes down and spends a minute reconnecting!

[audryla]

Thanks!!!
Works like a charm and not only on server
First time, when get bcm4306 rev 3 working without pain...
off course do not forget wpa_suppicant.conf and /etc/network/interfaces files. Some info here:
http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Lucid#Wireless
http://hostap.epitest.fi/wpa_supplicant/
wpa_supplicant file sample
One important thing on desktop: remove network-manager

sudo apt-get remove network-manager

This will avoid something like this:

Works for me... for 30 seconds, then it goes down and spends a minute reconnecting!

BR
audryla