Ok I have a broadcom airforce wireless card and I'm running gentoo linux. Last night I was browsing this board and saw that to get this card working I needed to use the linuxant driver loader. I did that and the driver loads fine but when the module starts the card isn't initialized. I tryed using ndiswrapper and got the driver loaded and the card would initalize but the module would not load under my kernel. I've been trying to get this working for days and I would really appreciate any help that can be given thanks.

so can you see your AP? the lights are on the card as well, or if it's a laptop, the lights come on , on the button?

gentoo 64bit or 32 bit system?

lastly, if your driver is working and it finds the AP, did you try or if u aren't using wlan0 it could be eth1 or something.

what's the outcome of , please paste that into your reply.

its a 64bit gentoo system and when I use linuxant the lights do not turn on. also it does not find the access point

well, lights not on, mean it doesn't work... just that the lights may not turn on. there is evidence of this happening back in the day. Ok since u are using a 64 bit system on a 64 bit machine, you do have a 64 bit driver correct? you need a 64 bit driver. windows doesn't as it's a 32 bit machine using a 64 bit processor.

ndiswrapper does the same thing and is cheaper (free).

i've used both, on my 64 bit machine with 64 bit processor (turion) and can proudly say i'm talking to you wireless like.

try this post... my frustrations could help you.

posting click here

I'm having a similar problem. I just got a new laptop for Christmas, a Compaq Presario R4000 series, with an AMD 64 processor. (I told Dad to get me a laptop with Linux preinstalled, but I guess he found this one cheaper, oy vay!) It comes with a Broadcom Wifi adapter builtin. It works fine in Windows, but I have yet to be able to get it to work in Linux. I'm using Fedora Core 4 64-bit. I downloaded 64-bit drivers for the card from Linuxant (netbcl564, I think it was called), and tried to get it to work with ndiswrapper.
It installs fine. "ndisrapper -l" says that the driver and hardware are both present. I've modprobed ndiswrapper, wlan0 appears fine, but when I do "ifup wlan0" it tries for a little while, and then it says "No link present . . . check cable?" or something like that. I'm using the computer in Windows right now, so I can't check the exact error message.
ifcfg-wlan0 is fine, I'm sure of that. Manually configuring everything with iwconfig doesn't help anything. I've tried everything I can find on any HOW-TO, or message board on the subject with no change.
Has anyone had any success with this who can give any extra advice. If I can't get this, I may have to resign myself to just using Windows on this computer, which I REALLY don't want to do.

dude, i was where you were last week.

ifup wlan0 sucks. i can't get it to work and the research is too little on the forums... did you follow the link in my last post? seriously, you need to do the following steps, and most is explained in my post, again, above.

here is the exec-summary for you.

make sure you have ndiswrapper 1.7
make sure you have wireless-tools v28 ( the newest one you can get)
make sure you have the latest version of dhclient from www.isc.org
make sure you filter your mac address on your base station.
make sure you open ports 67 and 68 UDP(i think its that, or something similar, look at the readme file on isc.org... that actually was what did it for me, i'm sure of it... try that first... then follow the rest of my "make sure"'s.)

it's worth it dude, and you'll get it to work.

so F$#K ifup for now, and when you have all the versions above, and you setup your iwconfig with your WEP code and AP name, do a and you're good to go.

actually please, just open your two ports on your base station... and see if that works, using dhclient wlan0 and not ifup... ok? just for fun.

Well, I tried your instructions, and they didn't work.

I think I have a more signifcant problem. I think, for some reason, it doesn't seem able to actually turn on the adapter. There's a button to turn it on in Windows, which lights up when it's on, which, of course, doesn't work in Linux (xev doesn't even recognize it being pressed). When I'm in Windows, and I have it turned on, the computer produces a lot more heat (and uses a lot more power) than when it's turned off. That doesn't happen in Linux. That seems to be the real problem. I found a mention once on a forum post where someone else had the same problem, I think also with a Compaq laptop, but the person didn't say if he found a solution.
Has anybody has this problem, and found a solution?

yea drj000 thats a pretty good description of my prob I tried following the directions in supernewsb other threads also no go

ok, here's a site for you , if you haven't been there before.

http://www.tuxmobil.comclick on laptops/ near the top and then navigate to a similar computer... you'll see a plethora of compaq's and one that is close to what you own.

When you find your comp, you'll see people who have tried to put linux on a compaq laptop and all their 'things' are documented on the web. i found one once, that mentioned it still worked, even t hough the lights not on.

do me a favor, both of you and paste the results of please. if you don't use wlan0, replace it with what you think it should be, e.g., eth1.

iwlist wlan0 scan returns no scan results

I went to the link you provided, and found various tutorials for similar laptops, but none for the same line (Presario R4000). All of the ones that looked promising gave the same instructions that I've found everywhere else. One even suggested that the button should be hardwired to turn on the card, and under Linux would light up while transmitting, but that didn't work for me.

please post your ndiswrapper -l

you did you ndiswrapper right?

For AMD 64-bit based systems with an x86_64 kernel use;

ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/note...bit/80211g.zip

$ ls -l
total 2716
-rw-rw-r-- 1 lenard lenard 7836 May 17 2005 bcm43xx.cat
-rw-rw-r-- 1 lenard lenard 467456 May 12 2005 BCMWL564.SYS
-rw-rw-r-- 1 lenard lenard 383934 May 14 2005 bcmwl5.inf

$ ndiswrapper -l
Installed drivers:
bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present

I had previously tried the driver that Lenard suggest, and with it ndiswrapper -l gave me but it didn't say hardware present. I found another generic 64-bit Broadcom driver at Linuxant, called netbc564, which included the same BCMWL564.SYS.
Anyway, ndiswrapper -l with that one gave me both driver present, and hardware present.

Not quite the same;

Linuxant driver;

-rw------- 1 lenard lenard 480256 Dec 2 2004 BCMWL564.SYS
-rw------- 1 lenard lenard 23732 Dec 3 2004 netbc564.inf

Acer driver;
-rw-rw-r-- 1 lenard lenard 467456 May 12 2005 BCMWL564.SYS
-rw-rw-r-- 1 lenard lenard 383934 May 14 2005 bcmwl5.inf

Try both, use the one that works for your hardware.

I didn't previously notice the difference in permissions. So, I tried chaning the permissions on the Linuxant driver to 664 before installing this time around. It didn't help any. I think I'm just going to wait until the people at http://bcm43xx.berlios.de/ get a more fully working driver (with WEP working, especially), and just use an external card (with an Atheros chipset) until then.