Problems with wireless on a Dell latitude D600 with a Broadcom BCM4306 rev02
 

Hello

Have installed debian on a friends laptop and having problems with the wireless.

lspci gives
Have tried using the B43 driver and B43 legacy drivers but neither shows the card appearing in ifconfig and iwconfig.

Have even tried the process on post 26 on this thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1767610&page=3 now I am stuck.

Thanks for the help.

Refer to the Debian Wiki rather than 'buntu forums...

http://wiki.debian.org/bcm43xx#b43-b43legacy

Getting that working should be as simple as:

1) Add the contrib repository

2) *
3) Configure the wireless interface.
http://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse




*if the wireless is the only network interface and you need to download from another machine/OS then just download the package from here:
http://packages.debian.org/squeeze/f...gacy-installer

Install with dpkg, e.g.

Hello

Doing that gives me this

But the b43 installer is not for this card. But will try the install again and see.

aptitude install firmware-b43-installer gives

Whilst apt-get install firmware-b43-installer

Looking at synaptic package manager there are both set of files both for b43 and b43 legacy.

So will remove both, restart the computer and try the b43 driver again

Ok reboot and still no wireless card, noticed in synaptic package manager that broadcom STA is still there so remove that and reboot the machine. Then try again.

Now iwconfig gives

There are no b43 drivers loaded. WICD network manager prefereences has wlan0 as the wireless and eth0 as the wired.

Will try the B$ legacy now and see what happens.

Reboot and once more b43 legacy
Looking at package manager fw-cutter has been installed so have removed that so reboot and try the standard b43 driver next.

Post outputs:

Ok b43 driver loaded

ifconfig gives
ifconfig
Iwlist scan gives
Ifconfig -a gives
My user name is active in the netdev file,

Wicd still does not see the wireless networks.

What am I doing wrong?

lsmod gives
Whilst the lspci gives
Thank you

It's the rev 02 device referred to in the Debian Wiki and here, so it should be using b43legacy. Try the following:

Reinstall firmware-b43legacy-installer at this point

Ensure that you go into wicd preferences and enter the wireless interface name (this is almost always blank by default).

Tried again, did the modprode and then the aptitude command:

Gives this:
Checking that there were no installed packages with synaptic package manager.

So still stuck.

It seems like a problem with the Debian post install script for the firmware-b43legacy-installer package. I've read a few bug reports on this in the past where it can get confused if there is a second broadcom chip - you have a broadcom gigabit ethernet chip and I would suggest temporarily disabling that from the cmos setup as a precaution. This may allow the script to just install the firmware normally, if not then try a manual install of the firmware:

This should fetch, extract and dump the correct firmware in /lib/firmware

modprobe out b43 again and modprobe in b43legacy. Ensure that wicd is set up to point to the correct interface and try again. If this still doesn't work, you might want to try building a newer kernel or installing 3.2 from backports.

If all else fails, ndiswrapper may be your only option.

Hello

Thanks for the help. Have done all that and seems happy

Installing the legacy driver I get
So how do I disable the network card from the cmos set up?

I did cat /var/log/dmesg | grep -i wlan
On the card itself it reads BCM94306 rev4 whilst on the broadcom chip reads

Looking up why the leagacy
When googling it draws mw to this thread:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1621331

If I disabled the wired network in the bios, at a guess I have to download the drivers before, so how do I do that?