[CentOS] Problems with Broadcom 4312 wireless

Fri Jun 12 04:46:49 UTC 2009
Eric Sisolak <haldir.junk at gmail.com>

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 7:25 PM, David
McGuffey<davidmcguffey at verizon.net> wrote:
> On Thu, 2009-06-11 at 12:00 -0400, centos-request at centos.org wrote:
>> Message: 64
>> Date: Thu, 11 Jun 2009 08:14:17 -0700
>> From: Bart Schaefer <barton.schaefer at gmail.com>
>> Subject: Re: [CentOS] Problems with Broadcom 4312 wireless
>> To: CentOS mailing list <centos at centos.org>
>> Message-ID:
>>         <6bb609560906110814t3c41faaci58d5b92ed7f42985 at mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>>
>> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 4:54 AM, David
>> McGuffey<davidmcguffey at verizon.net> wrote:
>> > 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.
>>
>> There are some possibly-related notes on this page in the wiki:
>>
>> http://wiki.centos.org/HowTos/Laptops/HP/Pavilion-ze5300_Series
>>
>> Short summary: neither bcm43xx nor ndiswrapper are a perfect solution,
>> and you may need to blacklist the bcm43xx driver to use ndiswrapper.
>>
>> That wiki entry was originally written for CentOS 5.0.  I'm currently
>> running 5.3 with the supplied bcm43xx driver and it has some problems
>> with duplicate/dropped packets so the performance is suboptimal, but
>> it does work.
>>
> Thanks...
>
> According to the guidance a linuxwireless.com the b43 driver (not
> bcm43xx or b43legacy) should work with the 4312 device.
>
> If I can't get bcm43xx and bcm43xx-microcode5.fw to work, then I may try
> to install the b43 driver and blacklist bcm43xx.
>
> Dave
>
>
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I recently got a Dell laptop that also has the dell 1395/broadcom 4312
card.  I was unable/too lazy to get the ndiswrapper thing working.

Much googling eventually turned up this blog post:
http://en.community.dell.com/blogs/direct2dell/archive/2008/10/03/linux-driver-available-for-dell-wireless-cards.aspx

I grabbed the tarball from:
http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

Then I followed the directions, which amount pretty much to compiling
the kernel module and installing it.  I did this on Fedora 10, though
I think it should work with CentOS as well.

HTH

--
Eric