Any hope of getting my laptop's Broadcom BCM94311 wireless running on CentOS 5? I find lots of references to using fwcutter to get the needed firmware from Windows drivers, but there's a Catch-22:
Version of fwcutter that generate files for the bcm43xx driver in CentOS 5 don't recognize the md5sum of any currently available Windows driver.
Newer versions of fwcutter do recognize my Windows XP driver files, but generate output in a newer format that is not compatible with the bcm43xx driver.
I've been searching and fighting this for quite some time. I have a Fedora 10 installation that runs the wireless just fine on that laptop (Lenovo 3000 N200), but I really hate the churn and instability of Fedora. I was hoping that CentOS 5.3 might include a backported b43 driver, but I grabbed a preliminary version of the new kernel (2.6.18-132), and it still has the old bcm43xx.ko driver.
Robert Nichols wrote:
Hello,
Any hope of getting my laptop's Broadcom BCM94311 wireless running on CentOS 5?
I have had that working on CentOS 5.2 on a acer extensa 5220 notebook with a BCM94311MCG wlan device and the following combination of software and firmware. - bcm43xx-fwcutter-006-3.fc8.i386.rpm - wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
Also take a look at http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43.
But the maximum connection speed for that setting was 24 Mbit/s with wpa_supplicant and WPA2. Now I am using a ralink rt61 pcmcia card with CentOS 5.2 and the original driver from the ralink homepage (54 Mbit/s, WPA2).
regards Olaf
At Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:29:48 -0600 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Any hope of getting my laptop's Broadcom BCM94311 wireless running on CentOS 5? I find lots of references to using fwcutter to get the needed firmware from Windows drivers, but there's a Catch-22:
Version of fwcutter that generate files for the bcm43xx driver in CentOS 5 don't recognize the md5sum of any currently available Windows driver. Newer versions of fwcutter do recognize my Windows XP driver files, but generate output in a newer format that is not compatible with the bcm43xx driver.I've been searching and fighting this for quite some time. I have a Fedora 10 installation that runs the wireless just fine on that laptop (Lenovo 3000 N200), but I really hate the churn and instability of Fedora. I was hoping that CentOS 5.3 might include a backported b43 driver, but I grabbed a preliminary version of the new kernel (2.6.18-132), and it still has the old bcm43xx.ko driver.
If the wireless card is on a miniPCI card, it is possible to replace it with an Intel ipw2100 type card. Going to the Intel wireless means you can use the fully supported open drivers that come with the kernels and not have to message with dealing with MS-Windows drivers or closed source drivers.
Robert Heller wrote:
At Tue, 03 Mar 2009 10:29:48 -0600 CentOS mailing list centos@centos.org wrote:
Any hope of getting my laptop's Broadcom BCM94311 wireless running on CentOS 5? I find lots of references to using fwcutter to get the needed firmware from Windows drivers, but there's a Catch-22:
[SNIP]
I've been searching and fighting this for quite some time. I have a Fedora 10 installation that runs the wireless just fine on that laptop (Lenovo 3000 N200), but I really hate the churn and instability of Fedora. I was hoping that CentOS 5.3 might include a backported b43 driver, but I grabbed a preliminary version of the new kernel (2.6.18-132), and it still has the old bcm43xx.ko driver.
If the wireless card is on a miniPCI card, it is possible to replace it with an Intel ipw2100 type card. Going to the Intel wireless means you can use the fully supported open drivers that come with the kernels and not have to message with dealing with MS-Windows drivers or closed source drivers.
Those ipw2100 cards seem to be scarce as hen's teeth now, and the new IBM/Lenovo laptops are reported to be very picky about what wireless cards the BIOS will accept. I can get an Intel WM3945ABG card, one that should be compatible, quite cheaply. It appears that the iwlwifi driver in the new kernel supports that. I just need to see if I can find an equivalent for a Broadcom-specific tool that I find quite useful under Windows XP, and then I can go that way.
Based on all the (much appreciated) info everyone has provided, I'm not going to further pursue getting CentOS 5.[23] to work with Broadcom wireless.
Robert Nichols wrote:
Any hope of getting my laptop's Broadcom BCM94311 wireless running on CentOS 5?
...
I was hoping that CentOS 5.3 might include a backported b43 driver, but I grabbed a preliminary version of the new kernel (2.6.18-132), and it still has the old bcm43xx.ko driver.
Not looking good. On the Linville test kernels page the b43 patch is listed as "discarded".
http://people.redhat.com/linville/kernels/rhel5/
Might try a request at ATrpms or RPMforge for a kernel module.
On Tue, Mar 3, 2009 at 12:49 PM, Phil Schaffner Philip.R.Schaffner@nasa.gov wrote:
Robert Nichols wrote:
Any hope of getting my laptop's Broadcom BCM94311 wireless running on CentOS 5?
I was hoping that CentOS 5.3 might include a backported b43 driver, but I grabbed a preliminary version of the new kernel (2.6.18-132), and it still has the old bcm43xx.ko driver.
Not looking good. On the Linville test kernels page the b43 patch is listed as "discarded".
http://people.redhat.com/linville/kernels/rhel5/
Might try a request at ATrpms or RPMforge for a kernel module.
... Or ask Alan Bartlett in the CentOS forums. He has built quite a few drivers (kernel-independent kmod packages) for CentOS users. You can see the list here:
http://centos.toracat.org/ajb/CentOS-5/
Akemi / toracat
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Akemi Yagi -
Olaf Mueller -
Phil Schaffner -
Robert Heller -
Robert Nichols