Here it is:
I own a M5312 eMachines laptop with a wonderful (previously hated
) internal wireless card. The Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03). This device seems to be in more than one laptop, but I think this should work for any of them. Here is the solution to get it up and running without it freezing at that critical "modprobe ndiswrapper" phase.
This whole solution assumes that you have ndiswrapper, wireless-tools and dhcpcd installed. If not, GOOGLE them and I'm sure you'll find them. (Warning: ndiswrapper CVS is different from the downloadable *.tar.gz file. This pissed me off a lot because I only found that out on accident after downloading several distros to try different combinations on
)
Simply browse to /etc/ndiswrapper/bmcwl5. Now, there you should see a bunch of files including the actual drivers for the device and around four configuration files. Go into the one called "14E4:4320.conf". Inside the file it will look like this:
NdisVersion|0x50001
Environment|1
BusType|5
ndis_version|WLAN,07/17/2003, 3.30.15.0
EnableSoftAP|0
EnableLeap|0
EnableAutoConnect|1 ***THIS IS THE TROUBLEMAKER***
RadioState|0
PowerSaveMode|0
frag|2346
rts|2347
NetworkAddress|
PwrOut|100
FrameBursting|0
BTCoexist|0
WEP|
NetworkType|1
SSID|
gpio0|-1
gpio1|-1
gpio2|-1
gpio3|-1
scan_channel_time|-1
scan_unassoc_time|-1
scan_home_time|-1
scan_passes|-1
BadFramePreempt|0
Interference_Mode|-1
antdiv|-1
RoamTrigger|-70
PLCPHeader|0
IBSSGMode|2
IBSSGProtection|2
Locale|15
Rate|0
Channel|11
What needs to be done is to change "EnableAutoConnect|1" to "EnableAutoConnect|0" to switch it off. This is the cause of the infamous hang after modprobing it.
After that whenever you start up you should be able to go into root or su and type:
modprobe ndiswrapper
ifconfig wlan0 up
dhcpcd wlan0
This should load the device driver, activate the device and then acquire an IP address. Do this and you should be good to go.
Best of luck!
-Zig
