Hey guys,

I own one of those

Compaq Presario V5305WM Laptop Computers, walmart had on sale back in Nov 2006 for $300 ya know? it was in the papers, but anyways,

I am trying to install Debian Etch 4.0r0

ispci shows I have a

Has anyone had success getting this to work in Debian yet?

I got it to work in Fedora before using This article but its using ndiswrapper and Network Manager, which I really didn't care for, because I had to boot the laptop in runlevel 5, just to have internet access, which I felt was rather annoying.. what if u wanted to boot into runlevel 3? no internet? (sighs)

My home network uses the "WPA Personal" encryption method,

but anyways, anyone have any success getting this wifi card to work in Debian by chance? I know the Kernel 2.6.16+ series of kernels, was supposed to come with native support for bcm43xx.sys already built into the kernel, but as I found out in Fedora before, support did not work too well, as alot of people found out I guess.

I'm liking Debian on my desktop system more and more, and I would just like to put it on my Laptop too, if I can get the wireless wifi card to work with Debian somehow?

thanks

According to the page for the driver, your card is confirmed to be unstable.

Unfortunately that means your only option until the BCM43xx drivers are fixed is to use ndiswrapper.

I have the same laptop and ndiswrapper is the only way to go. If you use module-assistant and the windows driver it is realitively painless.

thats ok, ndiswrapper is fine for now, Can you post instructions how you got it to work? that would really help me, I'm new to Debian, and I don't know how to do it the debian way, does your wireless work in runlevel 3 too? cuz thats all I care about, I just want wireless and WPA to work in either runlevel 3 or 5, without relying on the network-manager applet to connect to a wireless hotspot, there's got to be a way to get that to work from the command line as well? thanks