Hello all,

I have installed RHEL4 (Update 2) with a Linksys BCM4306 802.11b/g wireless LAN Controller (rev 02) card in it.
This card got detected with the lspci command. Now how to make in work actually i.e., where to find the driver. I already googled but no feasible link to this cards driver. Every discussion seems to end in ndiswrapper which is completely new to me.

Any help in this regard.

You've got two options with this card:

1) b43/b43-legacy - These are the drivers in the kernel and are almost certainly part of the RHEL4 kernel. Have a look at your lsmod output and see if either of them are already loaded. If you go this direction, you need to use a program called fwcutter to create the firmware files necessary for the b43/b43-legacy driver to work. There are good instructions here on how to do that.

2)ndiswrapper - This allows Windows drivers to function in Linux. To use this, you'll have to compile ndsiwrapper (usually pretty easy) and install a Windows driver (check out the ndiswrapper wiki for good instructions). You will also have to blacklist b43 and the ssb module, otherwise you'll get a conflict over the wireless card.

Hi,
Thanks for your answer.
I have moved to Fedora core7 for this. After installing I am confused as whether the wireless card is really installed or what, as in modprobe there is no entry of it.

In 'network configuration' window its showing only the Builtin lan card as broadcom Tigon3 but not showing the wireless one.

Below are the settings:


The /var/log/messages is showing

Moving to FC7 doesn't change anything I wrote in my first post. You either have to install the firmware for the native linux driver or you have to install ndiswrapper and a Windows driver.

If you look at your iwconfig output, it DOES see the wireless card (wlan0). And looking at the log output, it shows that bcm43xx (the now discontinued precedessor to b43) can't find the firmware files it needs. To get this working you either have to install the firmware (using the fwcutter version for bcm43xx) or install ndiswrapper and a Windows driver and blacklist bcm43xx.

Ok, I followed to go with the native one as in this link
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Dr...devicefirmware and used the deprecated bcm43xx driver procedure

Outcome is as follows:

Now the log is saying this:
After this I tried with with ndiswrapper as follows:
But still after removing the native driver wit rmmod as above it keeps appearing. Now if blacklist with these three lines
blacklist ssb
blacklist bcm43xx_mac80211
blacklist mac80211

then iwconfig doesn't even show the wlan0 interface.

I think I made it work using which method I don't know as its now showing in modprobe.conf and also in nework manager. But in modprobe.conf its showing

though I am using ndiswrapper. I am going to do the setup again to clear my concept of this wireless thing.

A couple of things I noticed:

- That log file entry complaining of too old firmware means that you need to find a newer Windows driver to use to create firmware files. You might have some luck if you look at the old bcm43xx site, but since that driver has been deprecated, they may not link to appropriate drivers. An alternative would be to get the latest driver from your card manufacturers website and see if that works.
Now that you've blacklisted bcm43xx, you'll need to load ndiswrapper. In your modprobe.conf file you could change that line to

alias wlan0 ndiswrapper

That should mean that when the ndiswrapper module gets loaded, it grabs the wlan0 name. Note that you may have to load ndiswrapper manually (or in a startup script) as Fedora probably won't automatically load it.

Also, you got the infamous 4K warning when you compiled ndiswrapper. In the past, a lot of Fedora systems completely locked up when the ndiswrapper module was loaded, and the 4K stack was the reason. It depends a lot on the Windows driver being used, but if it happens to you, the only solution is to either find a kernel that doesn't have the 4K stack limitation or to dump ndiswrapper and use one of the native drivers.

Tell me one thing, how will know that the wireless is really installed?
I now tried fresh installation of RHEL5 in that and after installation I found and entry in network manager windows and also in modprobe.conf file like alias eth1 bcm43xx.
Now at the log I checked and found that it was missing the firmware so right away I installed ndiswrapper as did previous post and blacklisted the bcm43xx and here is the output below. Does its installed now and how to make it active as no LED is glowing.

Your iwconfig output suggests that you do have a functional wireless card, however it looks like you've never configured it. Without configuring the card, ifup won't ever work. You need to use the iwconfig command to add your SSID and WEP key if you use WEP encryption. If you use WPA, then i think you'll have to use wpa_supplicant. I'm not real familiar with REHL, so there may be a gui tool to help you do this. At any rate, once you've got the card correctly configured, you should see the Access Point field in your iwconfig output change to the MAC address of your router. That shows the card is configured correctly and is associated with the AP.

Finally with your help the card found the access point after configuring though very poor signal but it works now. Why in linux configuring wireless is so much trouble!!

Great! Glad you got it working. Actually, this isn't hard when the chipset vendor supports linux. I have both Broadcom and Intel based wireless cards and the Broadcom cards are infinitely more difficult to get running than the Intel ones. Heck, since the debut of the 2.6.24 kernel, most Intel cards will work straight off the install.