known good PCI wireless NICs for FC2

[Mark Knecht]

On Fri, 8 Oct 2004 09:34:06 -0700, Mark Knecht <markknecht at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 16:42:27 -0700, Rick Stevens
> <rstevens at vitalstream.com> wrote:
> >
> > I have a Broadcom BCM94306 chip in my laptop under FC1 and FC2.  I use
> > ndiswrapper and the Windows XP ".inf" file for it and it works fine.
> > I also use it for my D-Link DWL-650+ card PCMCIA card (TI chipset).
> >
> > ndiswrapper is available at http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net.
> > Appropriate ".inf" files should be on the CD or floppy that came with
> > your card.
> 
> Rick,
>    My Compaq laptop sounds like a duplicate of yours. Would you be
> willing to help me out a bit on this?
> 
> 1) I have FC2 installed and dual booting with Win XP Pro. I'm in FC2 right now.
> 
> 2) I have the same Broadcom 94306 chip
> 
> 3) I can start downloading and building ndiswrapper, as well a
> collecting from the XP side the Windows .inf file.
> 
>    Assuming things go reasonably well, how you you load ndiswrapper?
> As I said, I tried doing this with the DLink and had trouble. I also
> tried the Broadcom under Gentoo and go nowhere.

Presuming that I'll get your attention later today, I have built and
installed ndiswrapper-0.11 from sf.net. I've found two .inf files on
my XP partition that seem to be relasted to this:

[root at flash root]# ls -l ~mark/Broadcom/
total 304
-rwxr--r--  1 mark mark  21905 Oct  8 10:14 bcmwl5a.inf
-rwxr--r--  1 mark mark 279318 Oct  8 10:14 bcmwl5.inf
[root at flash root]# 

I sort of remember that when I tried this earlier, on the Gentoo side
they said they were having better luck with the l5a version, so
following the INSTALL file instructions:

[root at flash root]# ndiswrapper -i /home/mark/Broadcom/bcmwl5a.inf 
ls: /etc/ndiswrapper: No such file or directory
Installing bcmwl5a
Warning: Cannot locate BCMWL5.SYS
Warning: Cannot locate BCMWL5.SYS
Warning: Cannot locate BCMWL5.SYS
Warning: Cannot locate BCMWL5.SYS
Warning: Cannot locate BCMWL5.SYS
[root at flash root]# 

 which doesn't look so good. However I see that /etc/ndiswrapepr got created:

[root at flash root]# ls -al /etc/ndiswrapper/
total 20
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root  4096 Oct  8 10:24 .
drwxr-xr-x  68 root root 12288 Oct  8 10:24 ..
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root  4096 Oct  8 10:24 bcmwl5a
[root at flash root]# 

with interesting stuff in it:

[root at flash root]# ls -al /etc/ndiswrapper/bcmwl5a/
total 52
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 Oct  8 10:24 .
drwxr-xr-x  3 root root  4096 Oct  8 10:24 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   462 Oct  8 10:24 14E4:4301.conf
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   462 Oct  8 10:24 14E4:4307.conf
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   508 Oct  8 10:24 14E4:4320.conf
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   449 Oct  8 10:24 14E4:4321.conf
-rw-r--r--  1 root root   538 Oct  8 10:24 14E4:4324.conf
-rwxr--r--  1 root root 21905 Oct  8 10:24 bcmwl5a.inf

so I'm apparently closer. However, missing BCMWL5.SYS sounds bad, so
I'm off to get that from my Windows partition. (FC2 doesn't support
ntfs out of the box so I'm rebooting. I know you guys have some
drivers around somewhere for this, but I'm chicken... ;-)

Back in 20 minutes...

thanks,
Mark