hi

i am a newbie to linux. i have win xp system on my hp compaq laptop. when i cheked my network adapters it is broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN . my wireless works well in windows but when i log in to my fedora core linux ( i have 2 partitions, win xp and fedora core) linux can't detect any wireless . i am
confused. i read at http://www.hpl.hp.com/personal/Jean_...ers.other.html

that broadcom doesn't support wireless. is it true. if it's true , is there any remedy. i fucking hate windows man.

help

wood

Yes there are probably native drivers for your card as I think there are for broadcom. There's a link to the hcl in the menu. Search your card in there and see if the driver is listed. Also googling on your card number might turn up the name of the driver that you need. Or search the forums. It's been on here a lot.

There's also ndiswrapper which will use windows drivers but if there are native linux drivers you want to use those instead of ndiswrapper.

hi

how do i use this ndswrapper thing

wood

Well you go to the ndiswrapper site and follow the installation directions there. But as I said it's probably better to use native drivers if they exist. Searching takes like 5 minutes probably. What's the exact model name of your card.

hi

well, how do i check the exact status. as i said i googled and i found that broadcom has no linux drivers. thanx for yur patience

wood

Well broadcom doesn't provide the drivers itself. The drivers are made by the community. Well the model name often isn't just broadcom. It probably has version numbers and perhaps letters in it. Like for example broadom 4300 or so (making this one up) or what I'm using linksys wmp11v2.7. That's the name we need to figure out which driver. Just a broadcom chipset won't do as there are different chipsets out there IIRC which use different drivers.

I googled with: 'linux wireless broadcom driver" and on the first page there were sites of linux drivers for certain broadcom chipsets so if you give the name you might want to try those.

hi

i am sorrybut i am confused. can u give me exact guidelines. i don't know how to find that broadcom number u mention.

Well most of the time it's on the card you buy. Or in the manual/sheet that came with it. Lackig a better example: you say windows now but I want to know which, like XP or me.

I am actually just now finding myself in the same position as this Woodland but I have a compaq AMD Presario R300o w/ the broacom 802.11b/g wireless card, which I'm pretty sure woodland probably has. The only thing that I saw when trying to install drivers from Fedora was the Broadcom Tigon drivers which didn't work when I tried it. I am still searching but any references would be appreciated.

Well it would help if you can find the model name out Or the chipset it's using that would work too. But I think model name is easier to find.

hi darkleaf

i have win xp with me. well, last night i bootin linux and typed the command 'lspci' and
it gave me all the pci devices connected. so it showed me the following

Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)


so what do i do now

I will see if I can find the chipset, I actually was looking at compaqs website underneath my particular model computer for the specs on it and that was pretty much all it said. I think I did see a chipset so I will take another look at reply.

hi lmcil

long in as a root in linux terminal using command ' su -' and then type the command which i said in my previous post and u will see something like i saw. since i have a laptop, i can't open it and see
inside, so this command was of great help

wood

I wasn't sure if that command wouild detect anything if driver's weren't loaded. (It doesn't show much for me even though the drivers are loaded)

I've googled around a bit and it seems that there's no native driver. So ndiswrapper is the solution. Unfortunately it looks like they're playing around with the wiki so the installation instructions are gone.

So here it goes:

You need the kernel source on your PC, in /usr/src/linux

Download the windows XP drivers. Extract these. if they come in .zip use "unzip driver.zip" if it's an exe try to unzip it as well. If that doesn't work you'll need to use cabextract or an installshield extractor (don't know how it's called)

"tar zxvf ndiswrapper.tar.gz" (add the version number in it)
"cd ndiswrapper-(version)"
"make && make install"
"ndiswrapper -i file.inf" (execute this in the folder you extracted the driver to)
"ndiswrapper -l" (should give no errors and say driver present, hardware present)
"modprobe ndiswrapper"
"iwconfig wlan0 essid ***" (****=essid)
"iwconfig wlan0 key ****" (****=key)
"dhcpcd wlan0"

Then it should work. If it doesn't and you have a lot of security on I recommend turning it off and add the layers one by one after you get the one before it working so you know which step is failing.

I have a Broadcom 4300 series wireless chip in my dell inspiron 1150. I'm currently writing this using ndiswrapper for my internet connectivity. You'll need the bcmwl5 driver from windows to use this card. The directions provided by darkleaf work very well. Also, many distributions have their own ndiswrapper package.