enabling bcm43xx wireless in F10

[girish_rvd]

Hi .Im a brand new Lnux user trying to get my broadcom bcm4315 usb wireless adapter up in Fedora 10 (after googling thru numerous sources )These are the steps that I have followed so far (without success)
1)downloaded the bcm43xx driver firmware from the following link:
http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources...0.53.0.tar.bz2
2)downloaded and installed the bcm43xx -fwcutter .
3)used the cutter to extract the firmware into /lib/firmware location.

The sequence of terminal commands executed are given below:

[girish@localhost /]$ mkdir broadcom --->created a new dir
[girish@localhost /]$ cd broadcom
[girish@localhost /broadcom]$
[girish@localhost /broadcom]$wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources...0.53.0.tar.bz2 --->downloaded the driver sources
[girish@localhost /broadcom]$tar -jxvf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
[girish@localhost /broadcom]$cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
[girish@localhost /broadcom]$sudo /usr/bin/bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta.o --->'cut' the firmware

after doing this, I restarted the NetworkManager from system-->administration--->services
and rebooted the system.

After this on doing a ' lsusb' , the device is listed as under:
Bus 001 Device 002: ID 0a5c:bd15 Broadcom Corp.

Im not sure what I need to do to 'enable' this as the 'network' in system—>administration shows only 'eth0' for my ethernet LAN card but does not shpw any wireless connection.
It seems I have missed out something . Would appreciate some help !Please be '-v' in your replies as I'm very new to this.Pls let me know if further details are needed-thanks in advance.

[stoat]

These are the steps that I have followed so far (without success)
1)downloaded the bcm43xx driver firmware from the following link:
http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources...0.53.0.tar.bz2
2)downloaded and installed the bcm43xx -fwcutter .
3)used the cutter to extract the firmware into /lib/firmware location.


...It seems I have missed out something.

Hello girish_rvd,

That's right. You never had a chance. Not even from the moment you hatched this idea in your head.

1. Fedora no longer includes the bcm43xx native Linux driver. It was replaced by b43 way back in Fedora 7. See for yourself with these terminal commands in Fedora 10...

   /sbin/modprobe -l | grep bcm43xx
   /sbin/modprobe -l | grep b43

2. b43-fwcutter is used to extract the firmware for b43 from the Broadcom driver. It extracts the firmware files differently than bcm43xx-fwcutter does (even from the same driver file).
3. You have a BCM4315 chipset. But Linux Wireless (the home for b43 nowdays) does not include that device in the list of supported devices.
4. You have a USB device. Linux Wireless states that b43 will never support such devices. See the caveats section of the b43 page.

You are very probably going to have to use ndiswrapper and the card's XP driver. It's all well-documented here and elsewhere on the Internet. But if you develop questions or get bogged down with that, come back here for help.

P.S.: Those Broadcom firmware files in /lib/firmware will do no harm, but they can be manually removed if you prefer.

[David Vazquez]

Actually, you don't need to do this anymore.

In fact I had the same exact wireless card and got it up and running in 5 minutes. (No Exaggeration). Its very simply and you no longer need NDISWrapper or anything.

Here's the instructions:
Enable the Repository

su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

Update System and Install Packages

su -
yum update
yum install broadcom-wl

Courtesy of cenolan.com

Just make sure your hooked up to ethernet, or you can download the RPM packages:

Hi Steve, that's the problem with OTA delivery of network drivers!

As a solution, you can either use a wired net connection (!), or download the appropriate RPMs on a net-connected machine and transfer them to the target machine for local installation.

The RPMs you'll need for offline installation are broadcom-wl, kmod-wl and kmod-wl-uname-r. For example, for F10 x86_64 (kernel = 2.6.27.5-117) you would need the following RPMs:

broadcom-wl-5.10.27.6-3.fc10.noarch.rpm
kmod-wl-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm
kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm

You can find these here: http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/releases/

Hope this helps
Chris

Enjoy your wireless!

[girish_rvd]

Thanks a lot for all the help guys...
I'm currently doing the update and will try and see if the wifi gets enabled after installing the packages mentioned by ~su.

The update part seems to be taking a very long time though.

keeping my fingers crossed...

[stoat]

I'm currently doing the update and will try and see if the wifi gets enabled after installing the packages mentioned by ~su.

If that works, be sure and come back here and report because even BlueC (aka Chris who wrote ~su's HOWTO at cenolan.com and maintains the package at rpmfusion) doesn't know if it works for USB devices. After all, even the official Broadcom site doesn't include the BCM4315 in the list of supported devices. But I have no reason not to believe ~su. Besides, sometimes a chipset can have more than one number. They have even been known to be wrong as reported by lspci. Anyway, your experience will be important to report IMO.

[girish_rvd]

bad news to report - it didn't work.Here's a short summary of the steps followed (let me know if I've missed out on something)

1. I enabled the repository as suggested :
su -c 'rpm -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/...ble.noarch.rpm h
2. Then did a yum update - this led to downloading a large number of packages (totalling almost 950 Mb ??)
3. Note:To circumvent step 2, also tried to download and install the 3 rpms suggested by ~su , but that led me nowhere as the rpm installation had dependencies which did not allow installation (In case it helps, these are the error messages I got when I tried to install the rpms :

i)kernel-uname-r = 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64 is needed by package kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64 (/home/girish/Desktop/bcm_rpms/kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm)

ii)kmod-wl >= 5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5 is needed by package kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64 (/home/girish/Desktop/bcm_rpms/kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm)
because of the above, reverted back to the method in step 2 )

3)After the updates were done ,I did a 'yum install broadcom-wl' and lo behold:

[girish@localhost ~]$ sudo yum install broadcom-wl
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
Package matching broadcom-wl-5.10.27.6-3.fc9.noarch already installed. Checking for update.

4)Assuming that everything was in order, I rebooted and plugged in the usb device and unfortunately, all this seems to have made no difference.

Nothing (except eth0 - lan card)shows up in system--administration--network
lsusb returns the same output as before.

Out of curiosity , when I again tried to install the 3 rpms after step 3, this was the result:
On trying to install : broadcom-wl-5.10.27.6-3.fc10.noarch.rpm--->This package is already installed.
On trying to install: kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm----
kernel-uname-r = 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64 is needed by package kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64 (/home/girish/Desktop/bcm_rpms/kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm)
kmod-wl >= 5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5 is needed by package kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64 (/home/girish/Desktop/bcm_rpms/kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm)

On trying to install: kmod-wl-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm----kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64 = 5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5 is needed by package kmod-wl-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64 (/home/girish/Desktop/bcm_rpms/kmod-wl-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm)

why am I still getting these dependencies if the updates have already been done?
any thing else that I could try out?

[David Vazquez]

Well why don't you try to connect to the internet and just install the broadcom-wl package.

Also in System-Config-Network, click add, wireless, and then see if your USB device shows up.

But if you can update, just plug in the ethernet and install that package and that comes with all the dependencies.

Hope this helps!

David

[girish_rvd]

I did actually- and judging from the output I get for a 'yum install broadcom-wl', (Package matching broadcom-wl-5.10.27.6-3.fc9.noarch already installed) , the required packages have already been installed-pls correct me if I'm wrong on this !
Do I have to run any other terminal commands (insmod etc) to enable wifi?

<<Also in System-Config-Network, click add, wireless, and then see if your USB device shows up

Well,no.The device does not show up when I do the above - wondering if a usb bcm4315 on F10 is indeed a wild goose chase after all.
Sorry for the pessimism but really unsure what to do at this point.

regards,
Girish.

[stoat]

Well,no.The device does not show up when I do the above - wondering if a usb bcm4315 on F10 is indeed a wild goose chase after all.
Sorry for the pessimism but really unsure what to do at this point.

Well, I for one am not totally surprised about how this is going. For the reasons I have already stated above. And I don't think your troubles are necessarily Fedora-10-specific. I mean, have you ever made this device work with any Linux before? If David Vazquez has no more suggestions, then have you got an XP driver for this device? Maybe you can try ndiswrapper.

[akugel]

[...]
Out of curiosity , when I again tried to install the 3 rpms after step 3, this was the result:
On trying to install : broadcom-wl-5.10.27.6-3.fc10.noarch.rpm--->This package is already installed.
On trying to install: kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm----
kernel-uname-r = 2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64 is needed by package kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64 (/home/girish/Desktop/bcm_rpms/kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm)
kmod-wl >= 5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5 is needed by package kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64 (/home/girish/Desktop/bcm_rpms/kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm)

On trying to install: kmod-wl-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm----kmod-wl-2.6.27.5-117.fc10.x86_64 = 5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5 is needed by package kmod-wl5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64 (/home/girish/Desktop/bcm_rpms/kmod-wl-5.10.27.6-5.fc10.5.x86_64.rpm)

why am I still getting these dependencies if the updates have already been done?
any thing else that I could try out?

I found I'd picked up a yum extension called "protectbase" that kept certain updates from happening. If you are setting up a system that isn't working yet I think it'd be reasonable to try "yum --disableplugin=protectbase update".
(note that I had my working wireless broken on an -dispableplugin=protectbase update, but I'd assume you can't further break it if it isn't working yet!)

[powerbooksteve]

I'm having this same problem. It was suggested I install akmod-wl which didn't work either:

[root@rabbit steve]# yum install akmod-wl
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
rpmfusion-nonfree-updates | 2.7 kB 00:00
fedora | 2.8 kB 00:00
rpmfusion-free-updates | 2.7 kB 00:00
rpmfusion-free | 2.7 kB 00:00
updates | 2.3 kB 00:00
updates/primary_db | 2.4 MB 00:03
rpmfusion-nonfree | 2.7 kB 00:00
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
No package akmod-wl available.
Nothing to do
[root@rabbit steve]# yum install broadcom-wl
Loaded plugins: refresh-packagekit
Setting up Install Process
Parsing package install arguments
Resolving Dependencies
--> Running transaction check
---> Package broadcom-wl.noarch 0:5.10.27.6-3.fc10 set to be updated
--> Processing Dependency: wl-kmod >= 5.10.27.6 for package: broadcom-wl
--> Finished Dependency Resolution
broadcom-wl-5.10.27.6-3.fc10.noarch from rpmfusion-nonfree has depsolving problems
--> Missing Dependency: wl-kmod >= 5.10.27.6 is needed by package broadcom-wl-5.10.27.6-3.fc10.noarch (rpmfusion-nonfree)
Error: Missing Dependency: wl-kmod >= 5.10.27.6 is needed by package broadcom-wl-5.10.27.6-3.fc10.noarch (rpmfusion-nonfree)
[root@rabbit steve]#

still no wifi

[powerbooksteve]

solved with Dangermouse's autoten.

[sbrbot]

In new distributions like Fedora F10, Ubuntu 8.1, Suse 11.1 etc. everything (modules) is prepared for your Broadcom BCM43xx wireless card. For full operation only wireless card's firmware (in /lib/firmwares) is missing (Linux community is not allowed to distribute it inside their distros). The only think that you have to do is to extract Broadcom wireless card's firmware from file which you can find on Internet into /lib/firmware (using b43-fwcutter tool) and restart your machine. NetworkManager and b43 module will recognise new firmware and wireless card will be active for new wireless connection.

How to extract firmware is explained here.

[stoat]

solved with Dangermouse's autoten.

In new distributions like Fedora F10, Ubuntu 8.1, Suse 11.1 etc. everything (modules) is prepared for your Broadcom BCM43xx wireless card. For full operation only wireless card's firmware (in /lib/firmwares) is missing (Linux community is not allowed to distribute it inside their distros). The only think that you have to do is to extract Broadcom wireless card's firmware from file which you can find on Internet into /lib/firmware (using b43-fwcutter tool) and restart your machine.

Hello powerbooksteve, sbrbot, world,

It's always good when someone gets things working right. However, here is why what powerbooksteve said is potentially irrelevant and why what sbrbot said is inaccurate and misleading (with respect to both of them)...

powerbooksteve used Dangermouse's autoten RPM package to get things going. However, powerbooksteve never bothered to mention the wireless card's chipset (so far). What that autoten script does is download a proprietary Broadcom driver file and extract firmware from it that is needed by the b43 native Linux driver. However, the b43 driver supports only a few specific Broadcom chipsets. Go to the Linux Wireless web site (the home of b43 nowadays) to see the list of chipsets supported (and not supported) by b43. The original poster of this thread had a Broadcom-based USB device, and as I mentioned way back up there somewhere, Linux Wireless clearly states that b43 will never support USB devices. So I am happy that powerbooksteve has wireless now, but without knowing the chipset involved, his post does very little to advance what is already known about the b43 driver. And it does nothing for poor girish_rvd who started this thread. But it's okay to merely celebrate, too.

The reason sbrbot's statement is inaccurate and misleading is because it implies (states outright, actually) that the b43 driver will support any Broadcom BCM43xx wireless card. And as I have already demonstrated, that would be nice were it true. But it is not.

It's always okay to experiment and try drivers on new chipsets or chipsets not known to be supported by them. For example, the new Broadcom 802.11 Linux STA driver is advertised as supporting only four Broadcom chipsets. But through mistakes, misunderstandings, misguided advice, and pure luck, two more "unadvertised" chipsets were "accidently" discovered to work with it. So experiment away. But I wouldn't recommend it as routine advice.

[powerbooksteve]

It turns out to be the Broadcom 4318.