HP NX7400 & BCM4311 WLAN PCI-E card...any solution yet instead of kernel patching?

icest0rm · #1 29th December 2006, 10:00 AM

Hi,
I recently got an HP Nx7400 laptop, all is working flawlessy with FC6 just out of the box (also AIXGL + Compiz), only my wlan card is not recognized...

googling around I found that BCM4311 is not recognized since it is a PCI-E card...the standard kernel doesn't seem to support Broadcom PCI-E cards yet...

John Linville has just made some patched kernels with the PCI-E fix which should make your BCM4311 cards be recognized by FC6...

here: http://people.redhat.com/linville/kernels/fc6/

unfortunately I tried but can't boot with that kernel, since X Server crash (saying something about mouse - I have a synaptic touchpad)...does anyone know what I can do to make it work?

also other suggestions would be appreciated (like how patching my own current kernel etc)

thanks

johno12345 · #2 29th December 2006, 11:28 AM

you could use NDISWRAPPER, but then you wouldn't be using a native linux driver.

just a thought as you wouldn't need to keep patching the kernel then.

icest0rm · #3 29th December 2006, 11:31 AM

AFAIK the problem rimains since the patch just let the kernel find Broadcom PCI-E cards, but doesn't add any driver...

Ronnie Bass · #4 30th December 2006, 09:53 PM

I've been having the same problems with HP's particular wifi hardware. With WEP connections, I'm sailing along quite well. However, with WPA, it's become a nightmare. I believe I'd whittled the issue down to a driver problem, but I can attest to the problems with ndiswrapper and the BCM4318 x64 drivers.

I sought answers all over the web, from Google, to HP to these forums and beyond. The drivers seem to be the same in most places, sans a few specialized drivers.

The overwhelming issue I appear to be experiencing is with Association to the wireless SSID on a WPA-enabled Linksys router. The error "Association request to the driver failed" always comes up, regardless of which inf revision I'm extracting with ndiswrapper.

I tried the default BCM43xx driver with the BCMWL564.sys drivers, but the device becomes unusable at that point. wlan0 will never enable using that configuration.

So at this juncture, it appears that I will be hardwired until another solution presents itself. If anyone is monitoring this thread, please let me know if there's a way to fix this. FC6 works splendidly on my hardware, but the wireless just refuses to play ball.

Batman2372 · #5 30th December 2006, 11:48 PM

icestorm, I have a Compaq Presario V3015, which has the same PCI-E wireless card as yours. I've been watching Linville's test kernels closely, but as of 2.6.18-1.2861.2.1, it still hasn't helped me. An earlier one worked for about 10 minutes, but then nothing, and this was the case with others as well. I'll be watching this thread as well, as I'm hardwired until a solution is found.

icest0rm · #6 2nd January 2007, 09:50 AM

thanks for your report...let's hope patched PCI-E kernel will come up soon...then we will try playing with drivers..