Need help getting Mint 10 Julia GNOME to recognize Broadcom WiFi card

ichase · 11-29-2010, 08:46 AM

Greetings,
Hope everyone is doing well. Here are the specs for the computer in question

Distro: Mint 10 Julia Gnome
Dell Inspiron 1100
2.40 ghz Intel Pentium 4
8 kilobytes primary memory cache
512 kilobytes secondary memory cache
20 GB HDD
1 Gig MB RAM (2 512mb sticks)
Linksys Wireless-G Notebook Adapter WPC54G V3
CDRW/DVD Optical Drive

From the title of this post, you can see that I am having some trouble getting the Linksys Wireless-G broadcom card working. I have been doing some research and have heard that getting a broadcom card to work in Linux can be a real pain.

I have verified that Mint 10 recognized PCMCIA so I am good there. I installed Wifi-Radar to see if maybe it would recognize it but it did not.

When I type iwconfig, it does not show any wireless signals available. When I originally set up the partitions for this laptop, I used PartedMagic and was able to quickly set up the network on that with vertually no problem what so ever.

So maybe someone knows a trick. I did see a trick in the Mandriva forum but that is for Mandriva.

Thanks in advance for any and all assistance,

All the best,

Ian

business_kid · 11-29-2010, 11:01 AM

You're good on pcmcia?
Next step is to run 'lspcmcia' and get the number of your broadcom chip It may come in the form of 14e4:xxxx where xxxx is a hex number representing the chip. You need firmware. Go here, and follow it.

http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43

ichase · 11-29-2010, 11:44 AM

Thank you for the reply and the link business_kid.
When I enter lspcmcia I get the following:

Code:

ian@Ian ~ $ lspcmcia
Socket 0 Bridge:       [yenta_cardbus]     (bus ID: 0000:02:04.0)
  CardBus card -- see "lspci" for more information

So I type in "lspci" and get this:

Code:

ian@Ian ~ $ lspci
00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE/PE DRAM Controller/Host-Hub Interface (rev 03)
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 82845G/GL[Brookdale-G]/GE Chipset Integrated Graphics Device (rev 03)
00:1d.0 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #1 (rev 02)
00:1d.1 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #2 (rev 02)
00:1d.2 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) USB UHCI Controller #3 (rev 02)
00:1d.7 USB Controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-M) USB2 EHCI Controller (rev 02)
00:1e.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev 82)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL (ICH4/ICH4-L) LPC Interface Bridge (rev 02)
00:1f.1 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801DB (ICH4) IDE Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.5 Multimedia audio controller: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Audio Controller (rev 02)
00:1f.6 Modem: Intel Corporation 82801DB/DBL/DBM (ICH4/ICH4-L/ICH4-M) AC'97 Modem Controller (rev 02)
02:01.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401 100Base-T (rev 01)
02:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCI1510 PC card Cardbus Controller
03:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
ian@Ian ~ $

It's not comming up with a PC-ID but does show the Chip BCM 4318 which IAW your link is supported.
So I may be in luck. Will need to read the link you provided more indepth as it may very well tell me how to set this thing up.

All the best,

Ian

reed9 · 11-29-2010, 12:38 PM

You can get more info including the pciid with

Code:

lspci -vnn

However, the bcm4318 should work with the b43 driver and just needs firmware. If you have a wired connection do

Code:

sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter

ichase · 11-29-2010, 01:16 PM

Thanks Reed,
I do have a wired connection available which worked great when I performed all of the initial updates after installing Mint 10.
I will give what you recommended a try.

Let me ask a diferent question. I also run Mandriva 2010.0 KDE on another computer. I had to install SUDO from the repos. Does Mint 10 have SUDO pre-installed?

Thanks,

All the best,

Ian

reed9 · 11-29-2010, 01:55 PM

Yes, Ubuntu and most (if not all) Ubuntu derivatives, like Mint, use sudo by default.

Fedora, Mandriva, and a couple others do not, but set up a root account by default instead. In which case you can, as you did, install and configure sudo, or utilize su.

Login to the shell as root with su

Code:

su -

Run a command as root with su

Code:

su -c 'command goes here'

Run a graphical application as root with su in kde

Code:

kdesu application

with GNOME

Code:

gksu application

ichase · 11-30-2010, 06:55 AM

Thanks for the reply Reed,
I understand what you are saying as I am used to using "su" to root, though I have used "sudo" in Mandriva after setting it up. Was not able to get on the laptop last night to try your recommendation as the wife get's agrivated if I pay attention to that and not her.