Getting bcm4318 wifi card to work with Fedora 6 & 8

Robert P. J. Day rpjday at crashcourse.ca
Thu Dec 27 12:29:21 UTC 2007


On Thu, 27 Dec 2007, Rick Bilonick wrote:

> Several weeks ago I posted that my Broadcom bcm4318 mini pci wifi
> card stopped working with Fedora 6 kernels after 2.6.20-1.2962.fc6
> in a Dell Inspiron 2200. I had used ndiswrapper and the error
> messages I was getting seemed to indicate that I needed new
> firmware. Apparently, this was coming from the newer native bcm43xx
> driver built into the newer kernels - not from ndiswrapper. No one
> seemed to have any clue what was wrong. I inadvertently discovered
> that the reason was that ndiswrapper needed the b43 driver
> blacklisted (in addition to blacklisting the bcm43xx driver) for the
> newer kernels. I found a mention of blacklisting the b43 driver in
> someone's posting on the Internet.
>
> I discovered this when I temporarily switched a hard drive from a
> different laptop (a Toshiba Satellite A15-S129) that had Fedora 8
> installed without ndiswrapper. When I put the F8 drive in the Dell
> with the 4318 mini pci wifi card, I still could not get the 4318 to
> work with the native drivers (it seemed so close - but would ALWAYS
> end up causing the system to freeze while networkmanager was trying
> to connect). IMO, the native bcm43xx drivers just will not work with
> the 4318 in the Dell Inspiron 2200 under F8. (Maybe someone has it
> working and can prove me wrong.) Once I blacklisted the b43 and used
> ndiswrapper with bcmwl5.inf, the 4318 worked under F8 (and it works
> very well as it did before under F6, and blacklisting b43 under F6
> also works with the newer F6 kernels). So at least I know when I
> install F8 on the Dell's own hard drive I will be able to use the
> 4318.

well, now that i've beaten jigdo to within an inch of its life, maybe
i should go back and "cookbook-ify" my wiki page on fedora and
broadcom wireless:

http://www.crashcourse.ca/wiki/index.php/Broadcom_wireless_on_Fedora

i haven't looked at it in over a month, and it may be that things have
improved since then.  unless there's already a decent HOWTO on that
somewhere.  john?

rday
--
========================================================================
Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry
Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

http://crashcourse.ca
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