yet41

For anyone who is having similar problems, I managed to get my wireless working finally. I used the official Broadcom driver. You can get it here:

http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

It's suppose to work with BCM4311, BCM4312, BCM4321, and BCM4322. But I can only vouch for 4312. And someone discusses their experience with it here:

http://jomcode.com/fadhil/?p=59

I had tried this driver earlier (I think I commeted about it in a previous post), but had gotten several compile errors of this form:

/home/scott/hybrid_wl/src/wl/sys/wl_iw.c:934: warning: passing argument 1 of ‘iwe_stream_add_event’ from incompatible pointer type

/home/scott/hybrid_wl/src/wl/sys/wl_iw.c:934: warning: passing argument 3 of ‘iwe_stream_add_event’ from incompatible pointer type

/home/scott/hybrid_wl/src/wl/sys/wl_iw.c:934: warning: passing argument 4 of ‘iwe_stream_add_event’ makes pointer from integer without a cast

/home/scott/hybrid_wl/src/wl/sys/wl_iw.c:934: error: too few arguments to function ‘iwe_stream_add_event’

It was very easy to fix the source code so that everything works. I think the problem is there's a header file somewhere that is used but is out of date. But I easily fixed the problem by editing wl_iw.c. On each line where there is an error, I just added as a first argument in the function call the variable 'info'. I did this with each such error, and was able to compile the code.

Thanks everyone for all the help!

I should mention that the guide I used for b43-fwcutter is http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#fw-b43-new. Has anyone used b43-fwcutter before?

Nuts.

I just sat down, and went through the b43-fwcutter guide. I followed all the directions without any problems. But I've got question.

What do I do now? :)

Still no wireless. I went through the setup again, but it's the same old stuff about ndiswrapper shows up. Do I need to point ndiswrapper at another driver? I don't see a .inf file from the broadcom stuff I downloaded.

An edit: So I've used 'bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware bcmwl5.sys' to extract the firmware. I think that worked fine, and I think that was a step in the right direction. But still, what now?

I will play with these in the next day or so and post back with any questions I have. Thank you for all your help thus far.

Perhaps I do not have the correct driver. It's listed as BCM4312 802.11b/g in mcc. I thought I had read somewhere that bcmwl5 was an XP driver that would work. But maybe not.

Only my ethernet shows up. I really appreciate your time on this!

Perhaps I did something wrong, but nothing happened. When I tried to run

kdesu kwrite /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

nothing happened, so I opened up the file blacklist with gedit and added the line 'blacklist bcmwl5'. When I rebooted, bcmwl5 is still loaded, according to ndiswrapper. Going through mcc to use ndiswrapper gives the same results.

It's the one that ndiswrapper returns as being currently installed.

{BBI}Nexus{BBI}:

I'm trying to do what you said in the last post. When I try to unload the driver using rmmod, I get 'ERROR: Module bcmwl5 does not exist in /proc/modules'.

I'm not sure if you guys can help me out with this or not, but I'll anyway.

I've tried to get the bcmwl5 driver to work, but it isn't happening. So I am trying to get Broadcom's linux device driver to work (from Greg2's last post). The problem is, I'm getting compile errors.

/home/scott/hybrid_wl/src/wl/sys/wl_iw.c:934: warning: passing argument 1 of ‘iwe_stream_add_event’ from incompatible pointer type

/home/scott/hybrid_wl/src/wl/sys/wl_iw.c:934: warning: passing argument 3 of ‘iwe_stream_add_event’ from incompatible pointer type

/home/scott/hybrid_wl/src/wl/sys/wl_iw.c:934: warning: passing argument 4 of ‘iwe_stream_add_event’ makes pointer from integer without a cast

/home/scott/hybrid_wl/src/wl/sys/wl_iw.c:934: error: too few arguments to function ‘iwe_stream_add_event’

I am also getting similar errors for iwe_stream_add_point and value. But I don't even see where these functions are defined or declared.

Here's what I've got:

# cat /etc/release

Mandriva Linux release 2009.0 (Official) for i586

# uname -a

Linux localhost 2.6.27.4-desktop-0.uc1mnb #1 SMP Mon Oct 27 15:40:36 EDT 2008 i686 Intel® Core2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50GHz GNU/Linux

The third command doesn't return anything.

Thanks for the help. I would really like to get this thing working.

So I tried to follow things in the how-to guide, but ran into some problems. I tried to load bcmwl5.inf, but it was already loaded. I went ahead and unloaded it, then reloaded it, if that matters. When I use

ndiswrapper -l

I get 'bcmwl5 : driver installed', like I always have. But it says nothing about the hardware being present. I also don't have '/etc/rc.d/rc.modules', so I can't modify it. I am assuming that Mandriva has something different somewhere? I also have the alias line for ndiswrapper.

I'm running Mandriva 2009, and I am having problems getting wireless to work at all. I have got a BCM4312 chip from good old Broadcom.

I went through the 'Setup a New Network Interface' option in MCC, and I go to wireless. For the interface to use, my only option is to use ndiswrapper. I was originally trying to use bcmwl6 (I have the .sys and .inf files), but that's a Vista driver, and I've heard that they don't work so well with ndiswrapper. So I tried bcmwl5 (XP I think), but I get the error 'No device supporting the bcmwl5 ndiswrapper driver is present!'.

That's about as far as I've gotten. Has anyone else run into this? For what it's worth, I have a Dell XPS1530. I should mention too that I am very new to Mandriva. I am starting to feel like the wireless isn't going to work...