Message: 27 Date: Tue, 28 Jul 2009 00:31:53 +0100 From: Ned Slider ned@unixmail.co.uk Subject: Re: [CentOS] Problems with Broadcom 4312 wireless To: CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org Message-ID: 4A6E38E9.1010709@unixmail.co.uk Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Milos Blazevic wrote:
Hello David,
In brief, I've solved this problem on my Dell Inspiron 1525 (with Broadcom 4312 wireless card), so I figured letting You know would be nice, 'cause it didn't seem like the issue is resolved.
Visit this link: http://jomcode.com/fadhil/?p=59
and in addition check out the comment on the same page by Andre Kiepe to have the modules load on boot.
Best Regards, Milos.
I'm not overly familiar with broadcom wireless (always tried to avoid it), but we can probably package wl.ko as a kABI-tracking kmod for el5 over at ELRepo.org if you're interested? This would remove the need to recompile the driver from source for every kernel update, not to mention provide a user friendly RPM package for yum.
Also, does this driver require firmware, and if so where does one obtain that?
Sure I'm insterested in compiling the driver to RPM and making it available to others. I've tested the driver today (by connecting to the available access point) briefly and it didn't display any problems in functioning. Now, according to the news clipping from computerworld.com, by installing this, one would still use the proprietary Broadcom firmware, which, I suppose, comes along with the driver released by Broadcom at:
http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php
Also, according to the Broadcom's README, all other "firmware kernel modules" have to be removed (or blacklisted) from kernel before installing this.
I'm also willing of doing this, though, I am going to need some guidance in order for this not to take too long, since I've never done driver packaging before.
A few questions for start:
Ok, to build an rpm I need a spec file - this comes as a condition for packaging anything as RPM, right? Now, the only way to do everything else (i.e. blacklisting unwanted firmware files, importing kernel module, assigning modules to the devices ...) that I can think of, is via Bash script, or not?