hello,

I've just upgraded from Gutsy to Hardy 8.04 and unfortunately I'm "fighting" again versus the bcm 4318 wi-fi chipset driver.

I met the problem just after the installation process of the new O.S., when I lauched Synaptic to install the b43-fwcutter package, but I couldn't do that correctly because of an error "...a system bug??!:

During the installation process of b43-fwcutter from Synaptic, a window titled << debconf on "hostname">> opened, and then a text saying: "installation of b43-fwcutter in progress..."

after some second appeared a checkbox titled: "Fetch and extract firmware?"...checked! then I click on "continue" and an error appeared: "b43-fwcutter: the sub-process, post-installation script, sent the Error code 1".

I've tried to uninstall and reinstall the package several times but...the final result was the same all times...

Hi, I'm using ubuntu 8.04 64 bit and needed fwcutter and have got exactly the same chipset. I installed it through 'restricted drivers manager' by 'enabling' the driver. I'm posting it via wireless connection so it seems to work.


cheers,
lukost

Thank you for your reply Lukost, sorry but I was not able to install the driver directly through the 'restricted drivers manager'. Could you tell me the specific steps you followed to enable the driver?

I thank you very much for the time you are spending for me.

Don't mention that.. ;-)

I had ubuntu 7.10 with working bcm 4318 (do not remember how i installed that earlier). Then i upgraded to 8.04 (Hardy - it was RC but there were no upgrades since then). As you probably know updating Ubuntu caused wifi failure. So then i found 'restricted drivers manager'. There was a list of 'restrictred' hardware with my bcm 4318. I checked the 'enabled' checkbox and clicked 'OK'. fwcutter has been downloaded as well as windows driver... and that was all. After enabling wifi with keyboard i get "b43-phy0: Radio hardware status changed to ENABLED".

You can perform the last step yourself. As you probably know the wifi driver is installed in 2 steps - fwcutter is just a tool to extract driver binary code from windows(?) driver and prepare it with linux loader (as there is no native linux driver for 4318/9318). So when you install fwcutter it tries to download the windows binary and cut it as needed. You can perform last step yourself (there are some tutorials on the web). The last thing that i can suggest is removing fwcutter with purge option and reinstalling it...
sudo apt-get remove --purge bcm43xx-fwcutter
sudo apt-get install bcm43xx-fwcutter

Note you need a working internet connection to download driver binary for cutting. There is no driver code on the installation CD - fwcutter is just a tool.

cheers,
lukost