Broadcom 4311 wireless card problems
 

Okay, so I know that this topic is all too familiar. But, my situation is a little bit different. My only connection is wireless, so I can't just get any distro, plug in an ethernet cable, and start playing with the command line (which I haven't had any success with). So I was wondering, which distrobutions support broadcom cards out of the box, using the live cd. I'm currently using Sabayon (4.0), and it's the only distro I know of that supports broadcom cards out of the box. As nice of a distro as it is, I'm looking for something a little more lightweight, not too light weight, but something speedy, and well rounded as far as stability. But, I will take what I can get, any suggestions are greatly welcome, thanks.

puppy linux 4.12 96 mb use it then keep it for a tool . or like my girl friend did fall in love with puppy now does not want to play with the big dogs like slackware oh well . I keep a copy on my machine for emergency. it's fast and the gui interface is good. super simple.boot it click connect and set it up. It also has ndiswrapper built in to so you could us the window driver if you have it on disk.

Puppy has broadcom support? out of the box? And if so, what type of binary packages does puppy use? It's not .deb is it, because that would be convenient. and what's the default desktop environment, sorry to bomb you with all the questions, but thanks a lot.

it uses all of slackware packages and it has it's own package manager to down load from pup-get google puppylinux
http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/...-seamonkey.iso
It uses jwm it is a fast gui interface. there are othe puplets out there that have clear up to gnome kde. it has flash on it seamonkey pup-get firefox to and everything I run firefox Opera and seamonkey I used the java jre from slackware curent. you just type tgz2pup and the file name it turns it into a pup click it and it installs.
I have a broadcom card.

Considering the fact that Broadcom card have proprietary firmware, I'd be surprised if ANY distro supported them out of the box without at least manual installation of the firmware. I KNOW Debian and Ubuntu do not support them immediately on download, the firmware still has to be installed manually, or through a package.

Of course ANY distribution would allow you to setup the drivers manually, you would just have to download the appropriate Source and files, and save them to a disk the same way you download the Install iso for the distro.

The 4311 is one of the few chipsets supported by Broadcom's sta/wl Linux driver. Since it isn't an open source driver, it doesn't have a wide distribution, but the *buntus seem to have it in their restricted repositories. It doesn't work out of the box, but if you can grab a wired connection long enough to enable and load from the restricted repositories, it works well. Otherwise you can download from Broadcom and install sta onto your distro of choice.

Well, Sabayon has full support for my 4311 card, whether it be WEP or WPA. It was working right off the livecd, which was a huge factor in my decision to use Sabayon. I would have liked to start off with another distro like ubuntu or something a little more skill appropriate for me. I said that I used Sabayon on a forum, and a person said "Oh no, Sabayon is a Gentoo distro, and that's definitely not for begginers.". So that discuraged me, but I'm learning some commands, and I'm getting the hang of it, not enough to start from scratch on a pure Gentoo system, but I'm getting there, slowly. Does anyone know of an ebook or pdf that I can get to learn all about linux systems, how they work and such? If so, it'd be a lot of help.

http://tldp.org/

http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz

maybe those will help..

Hey farslayer what I have been reading is broadcom opened up to linux but the b43fmcutter or any of the fmcutter program that extracts is still not open. And you can figure who has there hands in the extracting program. yeap MS

puppy 412 worked out of the box for that card my card 4301. but 411 did not. 411 I had to cut the firmware.

Broadcom Wireless Out of the box
 

Mepis will connect you with a Broadcom wireless connection without having to download ANY driver. You can do so from the live CD or install it to hard drive, and never ever download a thing. The script is in the menu under System> Mepis> Mepis Network Assistant. You can download applications from the Debian Etch repositories for 7.0, and 8.0 should be released soon (I've heard the 8.0 release class is pretty stable though) which will be Debian Lenny.

AntiX Mepis runs a little faster and is for older hardware. It uses fluxb
ox, so not a lot of interoptibility with KDE and Gnome, and not as much eye candy. It's been a while since using, and I haven't tried 7.5 yet. It should have the same Mepis script in the menu as described above.

Back Track 3 will connect you as well. I do not remember the menu entry. Back Track is a live CD with a lot of diagnostic tools. It is a bit more difficult to install, I used a command line installation. Of all the live CD's I've used, it has the best wireless utility for Broadcom cards.

PC-Los live CD I believe will connect without any downloading of drivers. It's been a while, but I don't think I needed a connection. If one is needed, I think it is a one-click install from their excellent control center. PC-Los is an RPM distro with it's own repository, but I wouldn't be afraid of downloading Suse or Fedora applications as long as it's from a release with the same linux kernel. The hard drive installation is a breeze.

The sta/wl driver is relatively new, so it hasn't been put in many distros yet. To top it off, I'm not sure that the license Broadcom is using really allows for distros to distribute the driver. There is a megaton of legalese in the license so distros may be shying away from distributing it.