Several weeks ago I posted that my Broadcom bcm4318 mini pci wifi card stopped working with Fedora 6 kernels after 2.6.20-1.2962.fc6 in a Dell Inspiron 2200. I had used ndiswrapper and the error messages I was getting seemed to indicate that I needed new firmware. Apparently, this was coming from the newer native bcm43xx driver built into the newer kernels - not from ndiswrapper. No one seemed to have any clue what was wrong. I inadvertently discovered that the reason was that ndiswrapper needed the b43 driver blacklisted (in addition to blacklisting the bcm43xx driver) for the newer kernels. I found a mention of blacklisting the b43 driver in someone's posting on the Internet. I discovered this when I temporarily switched a hard drive from a different laptop (a Toshiba Satellite A15-S129) that had Fedora 8 installed without ndiswrapper. When I put the F8 drive in the Dell with the 4318 mini pci wifi card, I still could not get the 4318 to work with the native drivers (it seemed so close - but would ALWAYS end up causing the system to freeze while networkmanager was trying to connect). IMO, the native bcm43xx drivers just will not work with the 4318 in the Dell Inspiron 2200 under F8. (Maybe someone has it working and can prove me wrong.) Once I blacklisted the b43 and used ndiswrapper with bcmwl5.inf, the 4318 worked under F8 (and it works very well as it did before under F6, and blacklisting b43 under F6 also works with the newer F6 kernels). So at least I know when I install F8 on the Dell's own hard drive I will be able to use the 4318. Rick B.
