Hello,

Everyone seems to say there are no drivers for these broadcom cards. I believe Ihave found a solution. I installed some driver software and now my wireless card is shown in /sbin/ifconfig. I cant test it until monday when I will try accessing the wireless at work from linux. Anyway this is what I did:

Go to http://www.linuxant.com

Download the drivers for your system. I used the red hat 9.0 i686 rpm. I just installed this with rpm -Uvh xxx.rpm. Then you are given a url to go to. This didnt work for me, so the tech support told me to:

copy bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl5.sys to /var/lib/bcmwl5driverloader. These two files are found in your windows drivers folder (i.e you need to either copy the drivers from windows or get hold of windows drivers via some other method). Once I did this I could do :

bcmwl5config

and I had to input my license key, which you can generate at the linuxant website. I got the free trial one which lasts 30 days. It isnt clear what they will charge after that (if at all). All I see is their linux modem drivers cost 15 dollars. After running bcmwl5config I could see card in /sbin/ifconfig:

eth1 Link encap:Ethernet HWaddr 00:90:4B:42:36:69
UP BROADCAST MULTICAST MTU:1500 Metric:1
RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
TX packets:0 errors:7 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
collisions:0 txqueuelen:100
RX bytes:0 (0.0 b) TX bytes:0 (0.0 b)

Unfortunately when I try top activiate it it cant determine ip address. I am hoping this is because their is no wireless newtwork present where I am, and all will work fine when I try in the presence of a network.

I guess this product isnt really a driver - somehow it uses the windows drivers. I dont care as long as it works!

Please post if you verify that after using this recipe your wireless card works in addition to being detected by ifconfig. (if you had to do something extra please also post details).

This card is an onboard card in compaq 2580us laptop. Linux lists it as broadcom 4320 - win xp calls it broadcom WL450.

Cheers,

Mark.

Yeah, I have a dell 4150 with the bcm4301 802.11b mini card. Using gentoo linux and the linuxant driver my wireless actually works!!!!!!!! Unbelieveable. I went through 3 different wireless cards and couldn't get any to work. Then I come to find out that the mini card now actually works. Pretty cool to me.

Can you post what you did to get it to work ? I too have a 4150 notebook. I'm currently using the SMC 2635 card.

I actually followed the instruction on linuxant's site to the "T". I was luck enough not to have to rebuild my kernal or anything. There is also instructions in gentoo's forum. Search for linuxant in the forum to get results.

Can you be more specific? There is quite a few Gentoo forums website. I can only find the Windows version of the driver on Linuxant website.

I have tried the installation on a Dell i5100 running rh 2.4.20-9 and with a stock kernel 2.4.22. With both of them, the installation goes fine, but my card doesn't see any wireless network. I have exposed my computer to an SMC 2804wbr wireless b/g network and to a linksys wireless network and it didn't detect either If someone has experienced or solved a similar problem, details would be helpful to me.

Ron

Make sure that you configure your essid, and key encryption if needed.

Thanks,

I was hoping that the computer would be able to detect available networks on its own and log on however it only appears to work if I supply the essid. (auto doesn't work for me) I am up and working now and I am unbeliebably happy. I have been without wireless for a few months now since I converted to Linux and it is the one thing I missed the most from the old XP days.

Ron

Glad you got it working, now the question is, I wonder what will happen after the license expires? Will they offer a new one for free or make us pay?

Hi,

Sorry for not replying sooner. They (LinuxAnt) mailed me this:
"
Hi,

the thruth is that we don't know yet.

We are still negociating with hardware vendors and hope to be able to give
it for free. However, if we do have to charge to support the development and
support costs, it will be a modest sum.
"

btw it actually doesnt work for me.

doing /sbin/ifup eth1 gives me:

Error for wireless request "Set Mode" (8B06) :
SET failed on device eth1 ; Invalid argument.
Error for wireless request "Set Frequency" (8B04) :
SET failed on device eth1 ; Operation not supported.

Is this something I need to configure independent of installing the linuxant drivers?

Cheers,

Mark.

FW: FWI looks like linuxant will charge for the drivers after all.....


Hi,

Since you have obtained a trial license for DriverLoader, we are happy to
inform you that permanent licenses for end-users are now available from our
web store.

https://www.linuxant.com/store

You can take a look at the press release for all the details.

http://www.linuxant.com/company/press_dldrstore.php

Also note that DriverLoader 1.36 is now available from the download section
of our web site. We recommend that all users upgrade to the latest version.

Regards,

Jean-Simon Durand
Technical specialist / Linuxant
www.linuxant.com
support@linuxant.com

Yeah its a shame we have to pay for it. I ended up paying though $20 bucks is worth it to me to have the integrated wireless working in linux. One problem that I did encounter is I upgraded to 1.37 and now wep encryption doesn't seem to work. I had to downgrade back to 1.05.

Yeah, well at least it works for you. It wont work at all for me and I cant get an answer from their support.

Is that possible run under Slackware 12.0? I think slackware have refused rpm installations! Please let me know if i am right!

Thanks in advance,
Cyhaxor

---------------------------

Okay I've just discover that there is the rpm2targz command which converts the rmp to tar.gz suiteable for slackware!