How to activate Broadcom 1505 wirless card on RHEL
 

I installed ndiswrapper, and tried to use the Windows driver to activate the Broadcom 1505 802.11n wireless card on RHEL, but failed.

1. Add line 'alias wlan1 ndiswrapper' to /etc/modprobe.conf
2. # system-config-network
Add the wireless card and try to activate it.

But the error message pops up:
"ndiswrapper device wlan1 does not seem to be present, delaying initialization."

I checked dmesg and found no failure message related to bcmwl5 or ndiswrapper.
But the wireless card could not be detected by hwbrowser.

I successfully used Broadcom 1390 802.11bg wireless card on SLED at one time or another, via the help of ndiswrapper.

Can you please provide any suggestion?

First you need to make sure that the bcm43xx kernel module will not load, this causes issues with ndiswrapper. Edit the /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist file and add at the end;

#wireless
blacklist bcm43xx

This will stop the module from loading in the future.

Remove the module so ndiswrapper will work correctly; modprobe -r bcm43xx

Check/edit the /etc/modprobe.conf file and comment out (if present) the alias ethX bcm43xx line entry.

Create a file named ifcfg-wlan0 which is placed in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts directory, sample below;

When done restart the network service; service network restart