How to: Broadcom Wireless cards

[n00bWillingToLearn]

OK im not going to pretend to know what im doing... but I did this first time thru and it didnt work. (Network Manager wouldnt let me select or show up wireless at all, though it did say it was connected when I went to network connecetions)

Anyway this laptop is dual booting windows so I pulled the file out of the windows partition and placed it on the desktop.

I Tried:
sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware/2.6.15-25-386 ~/Desktop/BCMWL5.SYS

But i got a Cannot open input file error.

What am i doing wrong

There are a few things that could be going wrong but first check to make sure the drivers are working before you mess with network-manager.To see if your card is working correctly go to a computer with working wireless ( or boot into windows ) and write down the SSID ( network name ) of the wireless connection you want to connect to. Then ( in Ubuntu ) go to System -> administration -> networking. Now select your wireless connection and go to properties. Enter the SSID and password ( if it's an open network just leave that blank ) and hit OK. If that works then you need to comment out the interfaces in /etc/network/interfaces

sudo gedit /etc/network/interfaces

Then comment out ( put a # at the beggining of ) all but the first two lines ( having to do with lo )

[mikeeve]

Anyway this laptop is dual booting windows so I pulled the file out of the windows partition and placed it on the desktop.

I also tried the using the driver installed with Windows. It had a missing piece, and didn't work properly. So I downloaded the driver file the author suggests, and that worked fine.

[lupine_nickt]

Don't know if this has been mentioned, but the link to the .o file no longer works! I've found another copy here:

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/att...achmentid=7759

maybe someone can update the first post?

xF,

...Nick

[n00bWillingToLearn]

Don't know if this has been mentioned, but the link to the .o file no longer works! I've found another copy here:

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/att...achmentid=7759

maybe someone can update the first post?

xF,

...Nick

I also made a zip file with the already extracted firmware files ( just copy them to /lib/firmware ) and put it on my web page I will keep the link up and it is more convienient to not have to deal with fwcutter. http://trogdoor.googlepages.com/firmware.zip

[big_gie]

I must say that I tryed many firmwares for my 4306 card, many of them didn't worked.

I think it would be better if their was a kind of database on firmwares and their location, maybe on the wiki? Their are so many of them, so many different versions.

For me, the bcm43xx was to unstable to use. I'm back to ndiswrapper.

[axle]

Hi, I got my wifi up and running no problem..... thanks for the guide!

Peace,
Stu

[nickm]

Don't know if this has been mentioned, but the link to the .o file no longer works! I've found another copy here:

http://www.fedoraforum.org/forum/att...achmentid=7759

maybe someone can update the first post?

xF,

...Nick

Sorry its updated now, this new forum layout still confuses me.
I'l host it myself.

[wjbaird]

Wow! Thanks. Ndiswrapper has been a serious PITA to me for the last few months! This looks like it'll work so much better.

[Chii]

Wow.... thank you very much for this guide! I recently reinstalled Ubuntu to take another crack at it after giving up due to ~2-3 weeks of frustration with WPA Supplicant and Ndiswrapper, and now I am happily using my wireless card on my laptop

Now I can start trying to learn other stuff on this finally!

Thank you again
Chii

[Grudgebearer]

Ok, have gone through th steps listed, and my Belkin (Broadcom 4316) wireless card at least shows up now and the lights come on, but I still can't seem to pull a DHCP address, nor does the wireless icon show up on the top panel

When I run iwconfig, with my router set to broadcast the ESSID, WEP with a Hex key this is what I get...

eth1      IEEE 802.11b/g  ESSID:"SabbatMartyr"  Nickname:"Broadcom 4306"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=2.437 GHz  Access Point:00:14:BF:39:26:D5
          Bit Rate=11 Mb/s   Tx-Power=18 dBm
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Link Quality=100/100  Signal level=2/3  Noise level=184/100
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:22  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

Now, I have tried using a static IP address, and I have tried turning off WEP so that the access point is open and this is what iwconfig shows in both cases...

eth1      IEEE 802.11b/g  ESSID:"SabbatMartyr"  Nickname:"Broadcom 4306"
          Mode:Managed  Frequency=2.437 GHz  Access Point: Invalid
          Bit Rate=11 Mb/s   Tx-Power=18 dBm
          RTS thr:off   Fragment thr:off
          Link Quality:0  Signal level:0  Noise level:0
          Rx invalid nwid:0  Rx invalid crypt:0  Rx invalid frag:0
          Tx excessive retries:0  Invalid misc:0   Missed beacon:0

I am not sure where to go with troubleshooting this issue at this point. Any insight will be much appreciated.

Thanks,

Grudge