Broadcom 4311 Wifi Suggestion
 

For those of you who have the stupid mini-pci express broadcom 4311 chips found commonly in dell laptops. Instead of using ndiswrapper you might want to considering buying the Intel ipw3945abg mini-pci express off ebay. I got mine for $20. If you have an E1505 then all you have to do is pop the keyboard out and the wifi card is right underneath. You don't have to take the computer apart, its very easy.

Once you have the card just load atrpms and

# yum install ipw3945

It will install everything you need for the driver as well as the ieee subsystem. Then you can either re-boot or just depmod -a && modprobe ipw3945. After that the last thing is to run /sbin/ipw3945d. You're card will jump to life and not only are u running linux drivers, but you will also be amazed at the better signal you get.

Then after you do that take the broadcom out and run over it with your car... :D

At least for the E1505 another easy upgrade is to get the 355 bluetooth chip and connect it to the 'secret compartment' to the left of your battery. The chip you can get for about $25. The wireless worked great for fedora core 6. The bluetooth hasn't arrived yet but I know that will work great as well ^^. When the .22 kernel comes out it will have the ipw3945abg driver included with it.

nomb

Only problem I have is with the atrpms (or linva), these are not the best solution. Why in the world would anybody want to install this junk, everytime you upgrade the kernel you have to update how many packages????

Much better to use the dkms package from fedora core extras and the [dkms]-ipw3945 packages from freshrpms. No having to download 'replacement' packages for each new kernel.


FYI: the broadcom 4311 chipset is supported an should work just fine with the bcm43xx kernel driver for FC6; http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/?go=devices

They must have just approved the 4311 late last week because I checked on Tuesday and it wasn't stable yet. However the added range from the ipw3945abg vs the broadcom 4311 is well worth the $20. However ndiswrapper could have not been allowing the card to perform at its full potential. And actually just doing a quick search I'm seeing people even with that kernel having difficulties still. However it could be the users... :D I am seeing nothing but problems using the 43xx trying to put the card into monitor mode. But not everyone needs that.

To switch up my post a bit:

Try the 43xx broadcom driver and there is a good possibility it will work now without any problems. If you can't get it to work or something happens and u just don't want to use it anymore you have a fall back. I might throw mine back in just to see if i can get the broadcom 43xx drivers to work now that they are stable.

Anyway hoped this helped at least one person.

PS. Thats a cool trick with fresh I'm gonna have to do that.

Yea, the dkms enabled stuff is quite nice. I use an updated version of the dkms-ndiswrapper package myself, I have a Boardcom 4318 wireless chipset in my laptop and works quite nicely.

06:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)