[CentOS] bcm43xx CentOS5

Thu Jul 17 17:05:48 UTC 2008
Bart Schaefer <barton.schaefer at gmail.com>

On Thu, Jul 17, 2008 at 5:36 AM, Michael Simpson
<mikie.simpson at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi there,
> I have a BCM4306 pcmcia card (one of the later revisions) that i use
> to connect to my wpa2 wireless network.
>
> Wireless now works but is *real slow* just for internet access (like
> minutes for pages to load). ssh, ping etc all good and quick

I fear I can contribute more commiseration than assistance.  I have an
HP laptop with builtin Broadcom wireless.  I initially got CentOS 5
working with ndiswrapper, but had to change my access point from
shared to open authentication (WEP) and found that ndiswrapper fails
to authtenticate in the latter configuration.  The default bcm43xx
module handles the open authentication OK, but I experience a lot of
lost and duplicated packets -- experiments with ping show up to 30%
failure some of the time.  (I should update the HP ze5300 wiki page
with this info.)  I have to plug in to a wired net to do package
updates.

I have other wireless devices using the same AP with no problems, and
the same laptop performs well when booted into Windows, so this
appears to be a problem with the bcm43xx drivers.  I keep hoping that
each kernel update will improve the situation, but so far in vain.