Linux + Wireless NICS

I'm having the dickens of a time trying to get a Broadcomm wireless network card in a Dell machine working under Linux. I did it a number of years ago using ndiswrapper. But now there are supposedly native drivers, both open source and proprietary available yet no matter what I try nothing works and it's starting to get very confusing.

I am willing to consider pulling the Broadcomm card and installing a wireless NIC that is compatible with Linux. Can anyone recommend any ? Either that or can someone point me to a good ndiswrapper howto so I can refresh my memory of exactly how it's done.

i got a ndiswrapper cheat sheet for debian.

tomarrow i can write it up here

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Originally Posted by W2IBC

i got a ndiswrapper cheat sheet for debian.

tomarrow i can write it up here

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Much appreciated. I'll look forward to it.

Avoid ndiswrapper at all costs. Which Broadcom chipset is it?

It shows up as a Broadcomm BCM 4311, it's in an older Dell B130 Inspiron. Not sure of the chipset. Sometimes Dell OEM parts use a different chipset. I had that problem with a soundcard years ago. The thing is, it was working fine under ndiswrapper and Fedora 5.

Are you using rpmfusion?

If so - do a 'yum install akmod-wl broadcom-wl b43-openfwwf'

Once you do that, Hal should automagically load the module after reboot and show up as wlan0. You can then use NetworkManager to connect to any AP you like, open, WEP, WPA, WPA2...

And as for ndiswrapper, there's such a thing as working fine and then there's working well. Ndiswrapper tends to be unstable, doesn't interact with with the more modern networking tools Fedora provides, and it's simply giving in to commercial work arounds. :)

Further reading on ndiswrapper and the controversy. http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/NDISwrapper_and_the_GPL

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Originally Posted by W4GPL

Are you using rpmfusion?

If so - do a 'yum install akmod-wl broadcom-wl b43-openfwwf'

Once you do that, Hal should automagically load the module after reboot and show up as wlan0. You can then use NetworkManager to connect to any AP you like, open, WEP, WPA, WPA2...

And as for ndiswrapper, there's such a thing as working fine and then there's working well. Ndiswrapper tends to be unstable, doesn't interact with with the more modern networking tools Fedora provides, and it's simply giving in to commercial work arounds. :)

Further reading on ndiswrapper and the controversy. http://kerneltrap.org/Linux/NDISwrapper_and_the_GPL

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I did something similar last night but no go. But I didn't install all the packages you mentioned above. Since it's a fresh installation from DVD I'm going to apply the 500 or so updates and then install the rpmfusion repository then the modules you mentioned and we'll see what happens.

What's it doing/not doing? Does wlan0 anything similar show up in 'ifconfig' or 'iwconfig'? You may need to try manually loading the module just to get started. I'm not sure if those packages put the hotplug configs in place or not.

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Originally Posted by W4GPL

What's it doing/not doing? Does wlan0 anything similar show up in 'ifconfig' or 'iwconfig'? You may need to try manually loading the module just to get started. I'm not sure if those packages put the hotplug configs in place or not.

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No, wlan0 wann't showing up in ifconfig. Not sure if I tried iwconfig. Since I haven't done this in a while I may have forgotten some of the commands to use to check for my network devices. wlan0 was showing up in the GUI network configuration tools but beyond that it didn;t seem to know anything about my NIC or how to connect to it.

It's also possible that last night I might have installed the wrong modules. I'm going to try and clean things up and try applying the packages you listed above and see what happens. Right now I'm applying the 600 or so upgrades that follow a new installation...

I'll let you know what happens. Thanks for the help.

Okay, it's a No Go !!

If I enter "ifconfig" it shows me eth0 (the wired network) and lo (the loopback)

The output of "iwconfig" shows lo, eth0, and pan0 and says "no wireless extension" next to each.

If I clich on the Network manager icon it shows "Auto Ethernet" (which is check in use) and "System eth0". It doesn;t show anything about wireless networks.

The Network Manager tool lists "wlan0" but the "activate/deactivate" buttons are greyed out.

I'll look into it further and see if I can insert any modules that might work manually.

Beyond that I don;t know what to do other than try and go back to ndiswrapper. At least some wireless functionality is better than none at all.

If I try and install the modules manually , via insmod, it tells me they are not to be found. Where would they be located ? This is rapidly getting confusing. And at present I don;t have the time to read, "The Linux Kernel" from cover to cover. :(