Broadcom BCM43XX Nightmarte on F11

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Tue, 2009-06-23 at 22:44 +0800, Ian Chapman wrote:
> On 23/06/09 22:16, Christopher A. Williams wrote:
> > I have a couple of laptops I've been working on that I have not been
> > able to get WiFi to come up on at all.
> >
> > Both of them have the Broadcom BC43XX series adapters. One of them is a
> > Gateway MX6030 laptop equipped with a Broadcom BCM4318 adapter and the
> > other is a Dell Inspiron e1705 with a BCM4311 adapter.
> 
> Despite that fact that Broadcom are arseholes when it comes to Linux 
> I've found the adaptors work pretty damn well, thanks to the guys who've 
> meticulously worked to provide the kernel drives. I would guess that 
> you're missing the required firmware? It isn't distributed with Fedora 
> for legal reasons. Have a look here, particularly the section about 
> firmware installation:
> 
> http://www.linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
> 
> This has worked perfectly for me, for both BCM4306 and BCM4311. If you 
> try this, I would make sure broadcom-wl is uninstalled.

Thanks!

This worked like a champ. On both machines.

Just for clarification on F11, the _only_ thing that is missing is the
firmware. The b43-fwcutter version that comes with F11 works on the
firmware packages. There is no need to install it again. Also, the
firmware directory on F11 is /lib/firmware - the default location for
most distros.

All I needed to to was to download the correct firmware package and
extract per the instructions above, and voila!

Cheers,

Chris


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