FC10 and NDISwrapper

[Bill Davidsen]

John W. Linville wrote:
> On Thu, May 07, 2009 at 10:30:13AM -0400, Bill Davidsen wrote:
>> Jerry Feldman wrote:
>>> Rather than screw with NDISWrapper, are you using a BroadCom NIC?
>>> There is a native Broadcom driver in F10, but you need to load the 
>>> firmware. There is a utility called b43-fwcutter you would use to do 
>>> this from the Windows driver. In any case, it might be better for you to 
>>> describe your wireless chip and Dell model. Note that NDISWrapper is 
>>> bith a driver (ndiswrapper.ko) as well as a command.  But, in the case 
>>> of Broadcom, it will conflict with the native driver.
>>>
>> Where do you D/L the firmware? Or even find the name of the firmware file 
>> to try and dig it out of Windows? The wireless web site has numbers for the 
>> firmware, but they haven't matched any filenames for most of the laptops 
>> I've used.
> 
> The instructions seem fairly clear here:
> 
> 	http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#firmwareinstallation
> 
They are clear, but seem to only talk about the b43 and b43legacy drivers which 
still (FC11) don't support the bcm4410 NIC. There was a brief time when the 
driver used by NM thought it was a 4311 (or 4315, memory fades) NIC, but 
couldn't use it by any name.

The Broadcom site says that a driver for 4310/Linux is "being worked on," but 
that was claimed 15 months ago, so it isn't happening. Looks like ndiswrapper is 
still the only game in town.

> Hth!
> 
> John
> 
> P.S.  Note that you don't "dig it out of Windows", and that the
> firmware to use does not depend on either your host CPU or the exact
> wireless hardware.  Instead it depends on the kernel version and the
> driver in use (i.e. b43 vs b43legacy).


-- 
Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com>
   "We have more to fear from the bungling of the incompetent than from
the machinations of the wicked."  - from Slashdot