On Tue, 2007-08-14 at 07:04 -0400, Robert P. J. Day wrote: > at the risk of belabouring this issue (and i'm sure it's way too > late to be worried about that *now* :-), i'm still interested in > whether there's a known, reliable and deterministic way to get > wireless working on f7 (and, additionally, f8t1) on my laptop which > has a broadcom 4318 chip. > > having perused numerous web pages on the subject, i am now convinced > that: > > 1) it can be done and it's easy > 2) it can be done and it's messy > 3) it can't be done and i need ndiswrapper > > the perfect example of self-contradictory documentation can be found > here: > > http://www.linux-noob.com/forums/lofiversion/index.php/t3014.html > > where the original poster is confident he has a solution, while a > subsequent poster claims that he needed to do a bunch of additional > work. argh. > > so, is there, somewhere, a set of instructions that actually > represents a solution, and which doesn't contain the phrase "and if > that doesn't work, try ..." somewhere in the middle? > > seriously, if wireless is really this much of a hassle, fedora is in > for a rough ride. Robert, the day every manufacturer provides details about their hardware to the open source people is the day all this ends. Broadcom has historically ignored the open source community and only releases info to Microsoft. They've even told Apple to "get stuffed". Everything you see dealing with Broadcom drivers is because some VERY determined open source people have heavily abused themselves trying to come up with a solution that Broadcom has simply refused to do. Get on your laptop makers arse about refusing to buy Broadcom (or any other hardware maker) hardware until they actively support open source (nVidia, ATI, Texas Instruments, are you listening?). Now, as to your problem. First, you have to stop whining and try some stuff. You say you plan to use F7. Great. First, do a full update on it. I wish I could tell you which drivers you need, but without the output of "lspci -v" relating to your NIC, I can't tell. It's generally either the bcm43xx driver or the bcm43xx-mac80211 driver. The mac80211 drivers for F7 (2.6.22 and later) kernels need the V4 version of the Broadcom firmware. Where you get that is up to you. Most people download the Windows driver from the Broadcom site or here: http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/bcm43xx#devicefirmware and use fwcutter to cut out the firmware. Put the resulting file in your /lib/firmware directory. Now you can try to "modprobe bcm43xx-mac80211" and see if you get a wlan0 device. If not, try the bcm43xx driver solo. If that's still not happening, make sure neither driver will load at boot, reboot, then monitor the output of dmesg when you load the drivers and post that here or to me off-list and I will see if I can help you. I do have a day job, so I may not be the most responsive person you contact, but I'll try. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- - Rick Stevens, Principal Engineer rstevens@xxxxxxxxxxxx - - CDN Systems, Internap, Inc. http://www.internap.com - - - - Lottery: A tax on people who are bad at math. - ----------------------------------------------------------------------
