Wireless card with Broadcom BCM4318 chipset not working with Fedora 8
 

Hello Everyone

I am new to linux and this forum, and I was hoping someone could help me with my problem. I just installed Fedora 8 and my wireless card does not work. My card uses the Broadcom Corp BCM4318 chipset. The card is installed in my desktop and I have no wired internet connection to it. I am using my laptop to post to this forum and am hoping I do not need to connect my desktop to a wired internet link to get this to work. I would greatly appreciate anyone who could help me with this problem.

Broadcom Corp BCM4318 chipset does not have an open source driver, so use ndiswrapper with the windows driver.

I mentioned in my post that I was running Fedora 8 which is the latest release of Fedora (I am not sure if Fedora 9 is out yet). Fedora now implements the new b43 driver and so we no longer need ndiswrapper for that chipset. Thanks for your reply anyway though Simon. Anyone else out there have any suggestions. Thanks much

OK: lets look more closely...

I hope this means the wifi card is part of your desktop computer, and that there is no wired network connection to the computer.

You have stated only:
Exercising my telepathy, I seem to have tuned in to the wrong user. My apologies. If you would supply some information about this problem, perhaps someone may be able to help.

eg. What have you done to attempt to get the card working? Have you tried fedoras network device control? Internet connection wizard? What happened?

How about:

iwconfig
(what's the output?)

dmesg
(look for references to your card)

lspci -vv
(what does it say about your card?)



Note: You will have to copy over terminal commands and outputs. This will probably mean saving the output to a file, putting the file on removable media, moving the media to your laptop.... etc.

Ndiswrapper
 

Like your distro, Slackware 12 was supposed to have BCM4306 support and it did install the driver automatically. But it never worked. I don't know if there is something quirky with my machine but it wouldn't work no matter what configuration I tried.

Solution, blacklist the automatic driver, compile Ndiswrapper and use the Windows driver. It works like a champ on my laptop.

If you are new to ndiswrapper, search for Ace Blackwell (user search) and follow the Ndiswrapper thread and BCM43XX-4318 thread. I was given some good advise. Note the wificraig input. It wasn't 100% for my setup but it got me close enough I could guess the rest.

Good Luck
Ace

Hello Everyone

Just wanted to post that I got my wireless card working. I went Fedoraforum.org which is a great forum with lots of knowledgable and helpful people, and someone there was able to help me step by step using the broadcom drivers from the openwrt website. For anyone out there who sees this post and has the same problem I had here is the link to the fedora forum that helped me out: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showth...4&page=1&pp=15. Thanks for everyone on this forum who gave their time and input.

From that thread:... this is where we were headed.

bbfuller is very patient and newbie-friendly, and knows his fedora inside out. He's right - I am not a fedora specialist. A quick google also shows lots of f8 users resorting to ndiswrapper (which performs a similar function to the b43 code - it allows the windows firmware to interface with the kernel).

Other Distros:
Any distro which contains a main-stream 2.6.24 or later kernel should be fine with those instructions. The b43 driver will be included. The only caveat will be that not all distros will install the fwcutter utility out of the box.

eg. Ubuntu

To summerize:

You need:
A main-stream 2.6.24 kernel or better, for the b43 driver.
The fwcutter utility.
The appropriate windows driver: use your Windows driver CD or try here.

1. Copy the driver to someplace handy on your linux machine. (It is usually zipped so you'll have to extract it.)
2. locate the wl_apsta.o file in the driver tree - cd into that directory.
3. extract the firmware to your distros firmware directory:
sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware/`uname -r` wl_apsta.o (ubuntu)
b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta.o (fedora)
... others will be similar.

4. Reboot.

Caveat: This process may have to be repeated for each kernel upgrade.



Funny: didn't you notice that you had to enter "r o o t" followed by the root password to log in instead of entering your username and user password? Did you not notice that there was a difference?

XP and above use the same sort of model. But if you have not used Vista, you can be forgiven for not realizing. MS has copped a lot of criticism for keeping their customers ignorant.

Linux security starts by being open-source. This means that security proffessionals can (and do) examine the source code to find flaws.

The execution layers are well seperated - with security compiled in to the lowest level.

Apparmour - provides manditory access controls to the communication pathways between different programs.
SELinux - provides security contexts to applications - so an app cannot by conned into doing something it's not designed for.

Unix Permissions - keyed with the user accounts. Assigns an owner and a group to every file, and special permissions to those groups and users. This is called "Discretionary Access Control". The idea is that nothing has access to the whole system. Limits damage in the event of an attack or a mistake.

On top of that, you can add a firewall and AV. The firewall is supposed to regulate network connections, and AV is supposed to spot if you actually managed to install malicious software. f8 has a firewall by default.

It is recommended that you disable access to su and enable sudo instead. But not vital. However, you should never leave your machine with a root terminal open. (Note: just requiring superusers to use the terminal tends to discourage casual cracking.)

With all that - is it little wonder that linux is famously secure. It also means that some things will be a wee bit less convenient though.