Ubuntu 10.04 and Acer's Broadcom 4357 wireless

[Dittie]

I went nuts trying to figure out why I couldn't get my wireless working for my new acer aspire laptop. I have an Aspire 7551G-5407 with the Broadcom 4357 wireless and Broadcom ethernet.

I tried all of the things I could find here and through searching google with no luck. I installed ndiswrapper via .deb packages and compiled source. Ndiswrapper would load fine, and it would show that there was a card, but the driver wouldn't accept it, no matter what I did. I even tried wicd. Nothing worked. I was about to give up.

'lshw -C network' would display:

*-network UNCLAIMED
description: Network controller
product: Broadcom Corporation
vendor: Broadcom Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:06:00.0
version: 01
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: bus_master cap_list
configuration: latency=0
resources: memory:d0200000-d0203fff

Even after checking to make sure the driver was installed:

ndiswrapper -l
bcmwl6 : driver installed
device (14E4:4357) present

After installing wicd, no wireless would show up, still. It just wasn't accepting the driver. You basically have to have the STL proprietary driver for this to work.

I connected via wired network, installed the proprietary driver, uninstalled ndiswrapper and kept wicd. Rebooted and then set up the wireless. It was that simple, and after banging my head off the keyboard for a day and a half, it finally clicked that I did have the wired eth0 working

Hope this saves time for anyone else trying to fix their 4357 wireless.

[wyt168]

After installing wicd, no wireless would show up, still. It just wasn't accepting the driver. You basically have to have the STL proprietary driver for this to work.

I connected via wired network, installed the proprietary driver, uninstalled ndiswrapper and kept wicd. Rebooted and then set up the wireless. It was that simple, and after banging my head off the keyboard for a day and a half, it finally clicked that I did have the wired eth0 working

I have the exact same problem. So the only thing to do is to get and install "wicd" driver? I presume that "wicd" is the "STL proprietary driver" for the Broadcom 4357 wireless chip? Where can you get the driver?
Thanks!

[blackmail]

You will need the brcm80211 driver.
A good guide can be found here


Hope this helps.

Regards

[wyt168]

You will need the brcm80211 driver.
A good guide can be found here

Regards

Thanks for the link. Will follow the instructions to build the driver.
Just to be sure--will this source work if built on 10.04?
Regards.

[superduperlinuxperson]

bcm4313 is supported and can get working like this:
step 1: download these two things from here:http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources...a-3.130.20.0.o and http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/b...0.10.5.tar.bz2
step 2: extract the second one to your home folder, and copy the other one their too
step 3: download b43-fwcutter from the software center
step 4: execute these steps in terminal too get it working:

~$ sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
~$ sudo b43-fwcutter --unsupported -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/wl_apsta_mimo.o

[blackmail]

So did this work for you?

[wyt168]

I presume that "wicd" is the "STL proprietary driver" for the Broadcom 4357 wireless chip? Where can you get the driver?
Thanks!

Just figured out that "wicd" is a network utility that manages both wireless and wired network interfaces on Linux. So the next question still follows--is there a pre-compiled driver for Ubuntu 10.04? If so does it come with the distro or do I have to download it from somewhere?

Thanks!