Switching from ubuntu to debian, wifi hardware problems
 

I just switched a laptop of mine (Acer Aspire 5100) from ubuntu 6.10 to Debian testing. Everything is working great... except for wifi. The laptop has the Broadcom BCM94318MPG wifi chip, which worked out-of-the-box with Ubuntu, but when upgrading to Debian its not detected. Now I know that its probably due to some nonfree kernel module that the Ubuntu folks decided to put in, but I would prefer to have this laptop stick with Debian, because its so much more versatile. Does anyone have an idea of how I could get that kernel module from an Ubuntu install, and insert it into my Debian system? Thanks for your help.

Seems to me that I've heard there are drivers for that card in kernel 2.6.18. I think that kernel is in the current installation of Etch. From a terminal prompt, type # uname -r, to check. If you have that kernel, try to find a GUI networking tool, and see if you can activate the card from there.

OTOH, Broadcom is not a particularly Linux-friendly chip ... Before getting involved in ndiswrapper, I, personally would get a different wireless lan card.

You were right about the kernel number, and I totaly agree about ndiswrapper. Just thinking about that utility sends shivers down my spine. I looked in my gnome network settings utility, and there is only one net card listed, and that is my ethernet. Anyways, if the module for my wifi card is in ther kernel, its not loaded, because I did an lsmod, and I did not see it in there. Any idea what the module might be named?

Try module airo, as in 'modprobe airo'.

Ok, I did modprobe airo, but the system is still not recognizing the driver.

its a bcmxxxx module iirc. try 'modprobe -l |grep bcm' you will need to get the firmware for the card too, and use the bcm firmware cutter to get it out of the windows file that it comes in. Havent heard much good luck from people with these cards though.