On Thu, 27 Dec 2007, Rick Bilonick wrote: > 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. well, now that i've beaten jigdo to within an inch of its life, maybe i should go back and "cookbook-ify" my wiki page on fedora and broadcom wireless: http://www.crashcourse.ca/wiki/index.php/Broadcom_wireless_on_Fedora i haven't looked at it in over a month, and it may be that things have improved since then. unless there's already a decent HOWTO on that somewhere. john? rday -- ======================================================================== Robert P. J. Day Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA http://crashcourse.ca ========================================================================
