Hello.

First time here. I have worked on SysV UNIX and Solaris before (it's been a while). I am just checking out Linux now.

To start with I am trying Knoppix and Mandrake Move (boot from CDs) on an emachines laptop (AMD Athlon XP-M). Everything looks good except for the fact that the "autodiscover" doesn't find my wireless network adapter. It does find my 10-Base-T port (eth0). Both are Broadcom.

The wireless port is:
Broadcom
IEEE 802.11g Network Adapter
PCI bus 0, device 12, function 0
Driver Provider: Broadcom
Driver Date: 3/19/2003
Driver Version 3.10.53.0
C:\WINDOWS\System32\DRIVERS\BCMWL5.SYS
Service Name: BCM43XX
-and, of course, works fine in Windows.

I've checked out the Broadcom site but their driver area is confusing. They seem to have a few on their site but otherwise they send you to other websites that aren't clearly marked as to downloading drivers for broadcom interfaces???

Since this happens in Knoppix (Debian) and Mandrake I'm guessing that this is not a proprietary issue with the kernel or the CD Boot method. It must be more of a generic Linux thing.

Can someone give me a hand?

Hello again,

A little more research seems to show that there are no Broadcom drivers that support Linux. It sounds like I have to load an NDIS Wrapper.

I am going to attempt this - but I may need some help as this is the first thing I am trying to *add* to my Linux system. It seems like it would be easier to add it to an installed Linux as opposed to a CD-Based Linux.

We'll see...

Yes you are right. You must use either the ndis wrapper from http://www.linuxant.com/ which costs money, or http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/ which is free and GPL. You have to have kernel sources to use the ndis wrapper, and I don't think the bottable cd's will have kernel source. I am running an HP ze4560us laptop with a broadcom chipset 4309 or something I think. I couldn't compile the ndiswrapper with a default Fedora Core 2 Test 1 kernel and sources, but I have a suspicion that since the documentation says smp must be off in the kernel, that maybe it is compiled in Fedora's kernel. I will be working on getting a new kernel compiled and get this wrapper installed sometime this weekend. I'll post results here.

Ok I got the wireless broadcom card working with ease last night. You have to have your kernel sources installed, so just grab them from your distro. Then untar ndiswrapper 0.4 and glance at the INSTALL and README files. All I had to do was run the install.sh file in the ndiswrapper directory and tell it where the inf and sys files were. After that I created a /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifcfg-wlan0 file with the info I use to connect to my access point. Everything is working great here. I am using Fedora core 1 here. I found a post that goes into some more detail if you get more hung up: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/125571
This person did a great job of showing the steps the install.sh did for me, and they give a good example of a ifcfg-[your interface]. If you run into any trouble post it here and I'll do my best to help.

Thanks dr0ker. I haven't had much time in the last couple of days to work on this but you have given me hope that I can get this to work.

If it can't be done for the bootable cd's (I'm not sure where to put the source code) I'll just have to find a system that I can put a regular install on and compile the wrapper from there.

I'm looking at an ntfs utility to allow be to access windows files - so I can get to the kernel source and ndis wrapper code that way. A friend has sent me this link:
http://www.jankratochvil.net/project/captive/
as one of the latest ways to do that.