[CentOS] Problems with Broadcom 4312 wireless

Thu Jun 11 12:50:31 UTC 2009
Phil Schaffner <Philip.R.Schaffner at NASA.gov>

David McGuffey wrote:
> I'm migrating my son's Dell laptop from Vista to CentOS 5.3.  He came
> back from each of his first two years of college loaded with virii and
> trojans.  This year he said "Dad, can you give me Linux?"

Wish I could get mine around to that point. Re-installing Windows gets 
old pretty fast.

...
> Last problem is with the Broadcom 4312 wireless device.  Again, did some
> research and found two ways.  One was the Broadcom provided Linux
> driver, and the other was the guidance on how to use fw-cutter from
> linuxwireless.com.
...

This forum thread may be useful:
http://www.centos.org/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?topic_id=20640&forum=40

Although it is for a similar but different piece of Broadcom hardware, 
and does not come to a clean resolution, the key point seems to be:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Will you please now look at the output of a /sbin/lspci -n command that 
relates to your BCM4311 card.

If the Vendor:Device ID pairing is one of the following --

14E4:4301
14E4:4307
14E4:4311
14E4:4312
14E4:4318
14E4:4319
14E4:4320
14E4:4324
14E4:4325


-- then the bcm43xx driver module present in the distributed CentOS 
kernel will be appropriate for that card. In other words, there will be 
no need for you to use ndiswrapper.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------

HTH,
Phil