[CentOS] CentOS 5.3 - Activating laptop wireless card

[Ron Blizzard]

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 11:49 AM, Andrew Allen<andy.allen at 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.

-- 
RonB -- Using CentOS 5.3