bcm43xx-mac80211 issue
 

OK, I know this has been dealt with before, but I didn't want to revive old threads. Also I didn't see this problem addressed in those threads. So I am making a new one.

Background: Dell Latitude 110l Laptop
Mission: Get wifi support running.
OS: Fedora 7

So everything is good, I got the bcmwl5.sys and bcmwl5.inf from my windows driver and used bcm43xx-fwcutter on the the .sys and extracted the fw to /lib/firmware. Blacklisted bcm43xx and bcm43xx-mac80211 in /etc/modprobe.d/black list. Got the ndiswrapper tar, extracted, compiled and ready to go. So I move on to getting the to the meat:

OK, WTF. Why did it load the frakking blacklisted driver? I have rebuilt the entire structure and even gone as far as reinstalling the entire OS. I do not get it. Why is it bypassing what ndiswrapper installs and using the mac80211?

I tried using these drivers, and they are not working. After everything is said and done, my wireless driver doesn't show up in the list in the network manager when I hit new>wireless.

Any help here would be awesome.

Thanks, Mercnet.

Issue resolved.

What I did was add the bcm43xx and the bcm43xx-mac80211 in the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-compat file. I still got (alternate driver bcm43xx-mac80211) when I did ndiswrapper -l, but after continuing the process of loading the module, I went to the gui network manager and hit new>wireless and there was my card staring at me.

YAY!

Hope this helps anyone that was having this issue as well. Peace.

This "(alternate driver: bcm43xx-mac80211)" the driver is available nothing more, as a check do something like to verify that ndiswrapper is loaded:

cat /proc/modules | grep ndis

Also make sure that the bcm43xx driver is not; cat /proc/modules | grep bcm43
If it is then unload it: modprobe -r bcm43xx-mac80211

Also check and maybe edit the /etc/modprobe.conf file for both drivers, you want a line entry like for ndiswrapper like;

alias wlan0 ndiswrapper

And no line for the bcm43xx driver.

As root create/edit the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 file, example below;

TYPE=Wireless
DEVICE=wlan0
HWADDR=
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
IPADDR=
NETMASK=255.255.255.0
GATEWAY=<wireless routers internal IP address here, optional>
DOMAIN=
ONBOOT=yes
ONHOTPLUG=yes
USERCTL=yes
IPV6INIT=no
PEERDNS=yes
ESSID=
CHANNEL=
MODE=
RATE=

Also make sure that other ifcfg-ethX files (the one for the bcm43xx driver) is set not to load on boot or hotplug;

ONBOOT=no
ONHOTPLUG=no

It is a good idea to disable kudzu from starting at boot time also;

chkconfig --levels 2345 kudzu off

When done try restarting the network service(as root): service network restart

You really did not need to use bcm43xx-fwcutter for ndiswrapper, but nothing to fret about here no harm has been done and it is OK to leave the firmware files where they are. Also you had no reason to build ndiswrapper when all you needed to do is install dkms and the dkms-ndiswrapper package from freshrpms.net;

http://moonshine.freshrpms.net/rpm.html?id=49

This is a better way, no need to rebuild ndiswrapper after a kernel update. The driver gets rebuilt on the fly automatically for you the first time one boots into the new kernel.