BCM4318 hell
 

Please let me apollogize first thing for my degree of frustration but this damn wireless card is making me crazy.

First off, I'm aware there are many posts on this card in the "Networking" forum, believe me i've found plenty via google, but while only a few people (who so happen to be using ubuntu or some crap) have it working, most others don't and i've yet to see one who's got it working on a slackware laptop, that's why I chose to post this here.

Secondly, I'd really like to make this card work with the stock bareacpi.i kernel. I'm not kernel savy by no means; everything in that kernel works fine and I swear i've tried I don't know how many times to compile a 2.6 kernel, and it will either boot with a bunch of problems and issues, or it won't boot at all and i'm left with a blank screen. I'm talking selecting everything I felt needed supported, and after failures there, letting almost everything selected by default (which seems like nearly everything and much more bologna than is needed), go as well. I cannot for the life of me build a new kernel that works. I'm not a super-tech, i'm just an end-user type. I don't know anything about scripting or working with modules. Off the top of my head, i've had every piece of software I want to use running, and everything fine with the aformentioned stock kernel, except how to get that bloody wireless card to work.

If there's any of you fellow slack users who have this card working; I implore you to explain how you did it. In the beginning I wasn't interested in wireless, but this card is built in and there doesn't seem to me to be a good reason to not use it. I just plug in the good ol' cat 5 cable when i'm at home, but i'd like to have the option to use my laptop at wireless access locations too.

Thanks sincerely to all of you who are patient and took the time to read my angry rambling.

User Hangdog42, who frequents the Wireless Networking forum, is a Slacker and has helped several folks get the bcm43xx driver going.

His site, which includes some instructions: http://hangdog.pihl.no-ip.org/

His LQ profile, in case you want to search his posts: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...er.php?u=24833

hmmm gonna check that out, ive got the driver working under slackware ,but i cannot get the card to work using any form of encryption, you think no card is annoying try having a working card but not being able to connect to anything

You may want to load up ndiswrapper as backup for this chipset. Yeah, the bcm43xx driver will work with the 4318, but a lot of people have some pretty serious range/signal strength issues.

As for encryption, give wpa_supplicant a shot. There is an official Slackware package for it (I believe in extra) and it handles both WEP and WPA encryption. The wext driver in wpa_supplicant works well with bcm43xx and ndiswrapper, although there is also a separate ndiswrapper driver as well.

Well, after reading all of that I still have no idea what to do :confused:

First of all, i'm running 2.4.33. If I have to compile to a 2.6 kernel to use this wireless card then I won't be using wireless afterall. I keep having problem after problem everytime I try a recompile, plus I don't see any other need to recompile. Everything except this and 3d acceleration work fine.

Now, lsmod does not show bcm43xx. This means the "native" bcm43xx linux driver is not compiled into the kernel and thus not present correct? Am I therefore supposed to go with this 'fwcutter' route, or ndiswrapper?

Well, some updating; i'm online! I'm still not sure how, but after messing with it non-stop I got it to work and was able to log in to my wireless router. It's a generic no-name special from the computer shop. I apparently have no security from what I gather, and need to enable wpa. The router has the option but won't let me do it. I click it, tell it psk and give it a password but nothing happens. I found a wpa_supplicant package at slackware's ftp, but that stuff is way way over my head since I know zero about networking. Any suggestions fellas?

You might check out my site and see if that helps. I've got a section on wpa_supplicant that gives some examples of how to configure and start it. However, you need to take care of your router first. If it still isn't running in encrypted mode, you should check and see if there is a software update for it. If that doesn't work, take it back to the store, it is defective.