Broadcom Wireless in Fedora 10

Phaid · #1 6th January 2009, 10:20 PM

Hi.

I am fairly new to linux and have installed Fedora 10 on a laptop and made it dual boot with Windows.

Fedora 10 works fine but I cannot seem to get the wireless card working. I have a Broadcom BCM4311 card in my laptop. I have noticed that in the network devices I have two devices assigned to wlan0 (one is b43 and the other is Broadcom BCM4311). I have checked that wlan0 is managed by network manager and is loaded at startup but it does not seem to appear.

I tried disabling network manager via services and then going into the command line and doing "ifconfig wlan0 up" as root user but it didn't work.

When I do "iwlist scan" from the command line it says the network is down.

Can anyone give me some pointers on how to get wireless working.

Thanks.

Princerocker · #2 6th January 2009, 10:50 PM

This one's kind of hard, I had to hassle with it when I first got my laptop. Fortunately the instructions can be found here: http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Dr...reinstallation. Unfortunately, those instructions assume you're compiling, and I'm not going to let you do that.

All you have to do is install the firmware for your driver. So type:

Code:

wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
su -c 'b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta.o'

It will prompt you for a password on that last line. But that should do ya, good luck!

neogranas · #3 6th January 2009, 10:53 PM

Have you tried:

Code:

ifconfig wlan0

To make sure it is there? Then:

Code:

iwlist wlan0 scan

So that it doesn't waste time trying anything else. In the system-config-network GUI, do you see wlan0 in the Devices tab?

Phaid · #4 6th January 2009, 11:01 PM

@neogranas
Yes I have tried

ifconfig wlan 0
and
iwlist wlan0 scan
as per my original post. No joy there

@Princerocker
That assumes I have access to the router via cable but it is quite a way away and hard to get to at the moment. Was hoping to be able to get wireless working so I could access internet without trying to get anything first but if that isn't possible will have to see what I can do.

Phaid · #5 6th January 2009, 11:03 PM

My understanding was that since Fedora 8 there was an official Broadcom driver built into the image so I shouldn't need to install a driver as it should already be there. Just need to know how to get it working properly.

aditnsr · #6 7th January 2009, 12:02 AM

broadcom-wl does not work very well for me..
sometimes the wireless interface (wlan0) just isn't there when I type ifconfig -a.
back to ndiswrapper now..

ladaja · #7 7th January 2009, 12:51 AM

I've bought a Dell mini wireless 1490, broadcom chipset and with the default b43 driver/module it didn't work, but now, with your solution, works fine.

Thank you very much for the solution.

Princerocker · #8 7th January 2009, 03:09 AM

You can always throw the tarball on a flash drive. You can post on the forum, so I assume you have some sort of internet connection, right?

Edit--
I just thought of something, you say you're relatively new to linux. So I'm guessing you're probably posting from a windows machine. Paste the URL (http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources...0.53.0.tar.bz2) into your web browser window, hit enter, then it should ask you whether you want to run it or save it. Save it to a flash drive (mp3 player, cd, dvd, floppy, whatever you have around), then take it to your fedora machine. Save it to your home folder, then open the terminal and follow the instructions after the wget statement.

Phaid · #9 7th January 2009, 09:47 AM

Princerocker, you are right I am posting from a windows machine using my wireless connection

Will give your method a try and see how it goes on then.

Thanks.

Duilio · #10 7th January 2009, 06:56 PM

i got a broadcom 4306 and it works both with FC8 and with FC10 but not outofthebox.

FC8 with kernel 2.6.24+ doesn't recognize the peripheral
FC10 as is let you see the device but system-config-network can't rise wlan0 up

You must do that firmware trick

princerocker told you

now i'm running FC10 with broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5 (taken from here)
there are 3 newer version 4.150.10.5.1 to 4.150.10.5.3 but I can't find a b43-fwcutter compatible.

Give it a try, it's my 4306 (under FC10) that is telling you

Here for the whole story

Phaid · #11 8th January 2009, 08:33 PM

Princerocker, thanks so much for your help. I now have a working wireless connection on my Fedora machine

The link you gave me for the file didn't work though as it gave me an error saying it wasn't a valid bzip2 file. However I got the file from the link that Duilio gave and that one worked fine.