On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Andrew Allenandy.allen@virgin.net wrote:
Thanks, You don't happen to know when that was do you? It would be great to benefit from somebody else's experience, if they've managed to get this card working in CentOS (5.3). Trouble is, the instructions in the readme.txt on the Broadcom website obviously aren't CentOS specific. In the past I've installed additional stuff (eg skype) from repos using yum, which works brilliantly - I'm a bit wary of trying to install by other means!
I originally had a Broadcom wireless card in my Dell. It was based on the bcm4309 chipset which, unfortunately, is not completely supported by the bcm43xx project. I did get it to work using the fwcutter program (which "cuts" pertinent driver information from the Windows driver and allows you to compile it into the Linux kernel). I didn't really know what I was doing, I just followed step-by-step instructions. But unfortunately, as I mentioned, I got it working but the bcm4309 is not completely supported and I had very poor results. I think the bcm4311, however, is fully supported. Go to:
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
What I eventually did was just buy a wireless Intel network card from eBay -- Intel is fully supported by CentOS with a simple yum install. Since my Dell D400 uses an older style mini pci card, there are thousands of new ones on eBay for about $10 to $15 including shipping. Performance is great.
And the bcm4309 card got installed into my wife's Dell C640, since she uses XP it works great for her there.