bcm43xx does not power on at boot

jhwilliams · 02-08-2008, 09:46 AM

I have a Belkin PCMCIA wireless card that used to work automatically in Ubuntu, but I switched my laptop back to Fedora out of preference. The card no longer powers on.

My wireless card:

Code:

jameson@navy:~$ lspci | grep "Broadcom"
02:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

I have installed the firmware to /lib/firmware with bcm43xx-fwcutter as instructed at linuxwireless.org. I have NetworkManager and NetworkManagerDispatcher running at startup.

I created an /etc/syconfig/ifcfg-wlan0 file that reads:

Code:

TYPE=Wireless
DEVICE=wlan0
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
USERCTL=yes
PEERDNS=yes
MODE=Managed
RATE=Auto
ONPARENT=yes
NM_CONTROLLED=yes

So, that's all good. Here's what bothers me. My /var/log/dmesg contains these lines after boot:

Quote:

b43legacy-phy0: Broadcom 4306 WLAN found
b43legacy-phy0 debug: Found PHY: Analog 1, Type 2, Revision 1
b43legacy-phy0 debug: Found Radio: Manuf 0x17F, Version 0x2050, Revision 2
b43legacy-phy0 debug: Radio initialized

Radio initialized? Bullshit; the power indicator is not on. Also, I do not believe that b43legacy is the appropriate nomenclature for my device. linuxwireless.org and Ubuntu just call it bcm43xx.

Even if you have no experience with this device, perhaps you might have some suggestions on things to look for. Of course, the million dollar question, yet unstated, is "how do I get my wireless to work?" Many thanks!

stoat · 02-09-2008, 02:03 PM

Hello jhwilliams,

If you are using Fedora 7 or Fedora 8, the bcm43xx driver is no longer included with those kernels. It's just b43 and b43legacy now. The bcm43xx-fwcutter package that you used extracts the firmware from the proprietary Broadcom driver file differently than the b43-fwcutter package does for the same file (firmware is stored in different directories, for one thing). The b43-fwcutter package is installed by default in F8 and can be yum installed in F7. I don't know the native driver status of pre-F7 versions at this time, but FC6 was still using bcm43xx when I retired it a few months ago. You didn't mention what Fedora version you are talking about.

I used that same chipset in F7 and F8 with the b43 driver by extracting the so-called version 4 firmware from that same site that you linked in your post. I used b43-fwcutter to extract the firmware. It worked, but I now am using ndiswrapper for a reason that I no longer remember specifically. I switch back and forth between the two methods from time to time using what seems to work best.