Broadcom 4311 went missing?

[Peter Reed]

On Thursday, August 11, 2011 02:26:45 PM Kevin J. Cummings wrote:
> Hi Folks,
> 	I'll try and keep this long story short, and explain the subject line,
> ....
> 
> 	Yesterday I was given a Compag Presario F700 laptop.  It was running
> Vista with problems of intermittant hanging.
> 
> 	I tested the memory with memtest86+ for 6+ hours (11 complete passes,
> no errors).  I checked out the harddrive (120GB SATA) with smart and it
> only has 1 remapped sector, and no other obvious problems.
> 
> 	So, I installed F14.x86_64.  Vanilla install, wiped everything else off
> the computer, let the installer partition/format/install what it needed to.
> 
> 	Seemed to work, the system booted, but the wireless was not working.
> lspci showed it to be a Broadcom 4311 (rev 2) chip.  Some Googling
> around showed that I needed to install the wl driver, so I configured
> rpmfusion repos and installed it.  After a short period, NM found it and
> showed me the surrounding networks, so I disconnected the ethernet and
> connected to my wireless.  I worked for 5+ hours on this laptop before
> suspending it for the night (I closed the lid, that suspended the laptop).
> 
> 	When I got up today and restored from suspend, the wireless remained
> disabled.  A couple of reboots did not bring the wireless connection
> back!  After some fruitless re-installs of kmod-wl, I discovered that
> lspci no longer tells me that I have a wireless chip.  Indeed, when I
> look back into /var/log/messages for the latest reboot, there is no
> longer any detection of the chipset when I boot.  Yet, I can clearly see
> where the chipset was detected yesterday when I booted before installing
> the wl drivers!  I've played with the enable/disable wireless switch on
> the front of the laptop, but nothing I do seems to lets the latest F14
> kernel detect the wireless controller anymore.
> 
> 	My first question is:	Could this be heat related?
> 	My second question is:	Could this be due to me suspending
> 				the laptop last night instead of just
> 				shutting it down?
> 	My third question is:	How can I get it back????

You might want to check out this page on linux wireless:
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
I think you need to install the firmware for that chip.  The method used is on 
the above page.  I have never used the RPMFusion method so I can not comment 
on that, but with the information on this page I was able to get my b43 chip 
working properly.
Peter