Installing drivers for my wireless card
 

I am not able to connect to any wireless networks from my laptop. I read on one of the forums that I have to install the driver wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o and extract the firmware.

My linux distribution is ubuntu8.10

The output of uname -a is
Linux anirudh-laptop 2.6.27-14-generic #1 SMP Wed Apr 15 18:59:16 UTC 2009 i686 GNU/Linux

The wireless card on my laptop is
Broadcom Corporation B CM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)

output of lspci -vvn|grep 43-A7
02:00.0 0280: 14e4:4315 (rev 01)
Subsystem: 103c:137c
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=fast >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR+ <PERR- INTx-
Latency: 0, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
Interrupt: pin A routed to IRQ 16
Region 0: Memory at f4000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K]
Capabilities: <access denied>
--
09:09.2 0880: 1180:0843 (rev 12)
Subsystem: 103c:30cc
Control: I/O- Mem+ BusMaster+ SpecCycle- MemWINV- VGASnoop- ParErr- Stepping- SERR+ FastB2B- DisINTx-
Status: Cap+ 66MHz- UDF- FastB2B- ParErr- DEVSEL=medium >TAbort- <TAbort- <MAbort- >SERR- <PERR- INTx-
Latency: 32, Cache Line Size: 64 bytes
Interrupt: pin B routed to IRQ 11
Region 0: Memory at f8300c00 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=256]
Capabilities: <access denied>

I would be thankful if someone could help me.

From Linuxwireless.org, your chip doesn't seem to be supported :
and
The driver b43 is included in the kernel ; it should be :

/lib/modules/`uname -r`/kernel/drivers/net/wireless/b43/b43.ko

Look the messages from dmesg to know what the kernel does with it.

The link above give detailed infos on how to use/configure the driver, but if nothing has changed you seem to be out of luck with this chipset.

The easiest way for me on those older Broadcom chips is to use ndiswrapper and the windows driver. Some have used fwcutter and the native driver with some success. I am giving you a link that gives you all the options and the how to on installing those options. I will let you read and make up your own mind. If you have any questions please ask.

http://linuxfans.betaserver.org/inde...ides&Itemid=61

please read this thread as I think it may help you resolve your problem.

thanks...installing broadcom STA(wl) I think worked for me i did not try ndiswrapper because mine is a vista system and the link u gave said ndiswrapper wont work for vista sysytems.
but my wireless card is not able to go into the monitoring mode. I want to use a networking tool called kismet which requires wireless card to go into the monitoring(promiscous mode) mode. the link for kismet is
http://www.kismetwireless.net/

would be really glad if u could help me. once again thanks all of you for your replies

You may have misunderstood about ndiswrapper. It does not care what windows operating system you dual boot, you copy a windows driver to the ndiswrapper. I usually use a driver from XP. I am not sure if it would solve your problem.