How to: Broadcom Wireless cards

[Vaan]

Ah that's no problem. I am now viewing this thread and happily browsing the net with my beautifully working wireless connection.

Yet again you have managed to make this fix even simpler.

[swhit]

When extracting the card's firmware, I've seen this done differently by two seperate "How-To's". Which is correct?

sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware /path/to/bcmwl5.sys

or

sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware/2.6.15-23-386 /path/to/bcmwl5.sys

or does it not matter?

[nickm]

swhit, I put the firmware in that 2.6.15-23-386 folder and it didnt work for me,
I should think that that would lead to a problem when the kernel was updated too, but i dont know how that works...
so i think it does matter, i know my method works and i cant speak for the other method beyond "it didnt work for me".

vaan, im glad i can help , I think its thanks to you that this made it into the How to: catagory, which is a location that will make it much more helpfull to people, go team!

[slooksterpsv]

I promise I will figure out how to get this working for us PPC users, I'm going to try this method, and if it works for my Apple PPC Mac I'll shout it out the Windows. PPC has had the biggest issue when working with wireless. Wish us luck everyone - if I get it to work I'll write a How TO specifically for Apple Users.

[nickm]

Good Luck!! technically if it works isnt this the guide for apple users too?

[Vaan]

No problem, I'm glad I was able to lend some help.

Yesterday was my first Unbuntu experiance, and since today, it's been going very well. I love this OS. It's on a dual-boot with my WinXP Pro. I mainly installed it so I can get more familiar with linux and the terminal. Sometimes I do work via SSH (shell) on deticated linux servers, so it's extremely helpful to know how to use the terminal effectively.

Not only that, but the GNOME GUI is quite beautiful.

[rjstevens3]

Does not appear to be working with my HP dv8000. I have a Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02) and have tried a few different drivers obtainted from the ndiswrapper wiki (I'm not using ndiswrapper, but the windows drivers for my chipset will be the same). I have also tried the drivers from this guide without success.

The device shows up, but no essids show up when i try to configure. ifconfig shows that it is installed and should be working.

Has anyone else ran into this problem?

-RJ

[thecrazymonk86]

hey i got this message when moving the files into the firmware folder:

*****: Sorry, it's not posible to extract "bcm43xx_microcode11.fw".
*****: Extracting firmware from an old driver is bad. Choose a more recent one.
*****: Luckily bcm43xx driver doesn't include microcode11 uploads at the moment.*****: But this can be added in the future...

and my wireless doesnt work, i get an ip but no net and cant connect to router

[Ziptar]

Thanks for the excellent write up!! Worked like charm for me and I have been a linux user for all of 20 minutes

[crag277]

I followed a very similar guide on the wiki to try and get my Broadcom 4318 working in my Compaq V2000Z laptop. Only differences are I'm using Kubuntu and the bcmwl5.sys file form the compaq driver site for this computer. I thought everything was going great. The blue light came on after the driver install and it found my wireless network. But when I tried to connect, using Wireless Assistant in KDE it could not connect to the network. Now, the light is still on, iwconfig correctly identifies the device, but it no longer sees any wireless networks, even though there are two very strong ones in range. Any ideas?

I have a Turion 64, AMD64 version of Kubuntu 6.06, and 1GB RAM.

I saw another post of problems with this wireless device when the system has >1GB of RAM. Is there any merit to that?