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Belkin/Broadcom Wireless


martman
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Im driving myself nuts here with my Belkin 802.11g wifi card. I cant seem to find much info on the card itself, i just know its a cardbus card and that it uses teh broadcom chipset.

 

Im wondering if the boxset version of Mandrake will autodetect and configure this for me. Id rather not fight with this myself(ive heard some horror stories and i dont really have the patience).

 

Will this work?

 

Thanks

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Short answer: no. Broadcom has refused to release specs on their chipset and will not release the source code for their drivers. This makes making a Linux driver for their cards very difficult. You have to use the ndiswrapper to get the card working in Linux.

 

I know both Afrosheen and iphitus have this working, both in mdk10. I have no experience with it, so maybe one of them can chime in and help.

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  • 3 months later...

Hello from Windows (HEY! Stop throwing that mud at me!)

 

Just thought I'd chime in on this old thread because I have this card myself and am about to try testing it out. Will have to reboot to Linux to setup the hardware, an I'm not on a hotspot right now but will be later.

 

I have:

10.0 Community (probably needs a rack of updates but will do that first when I get MDK booted up)

Drivers from the card's CD available on shared partition

Latest ndiswrapper from SF (might just re-dl that thru RPMDrake anyway just to be safe)

 

Speak to you soon. Feel free to chime in with any new info that might be relevant since this thread went dead.

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Very little joy there!

 

The version of ndsiwrapper available from my update-source is only 0.4 so I don't even know if it will work with this card. Once installed it had naff-all usage info with it, so I can't really tell anything.

 

I've looked at the INSTALL notes for both versions, and I noticed that kernel source is required. Possibly due to it being all installed from RPMs, there's no /lib/modules/<VERSION>/build location on my machine. So if I want to build 0.8 myself, I need to have kernel source to put in there?

 

I'd heard that people have had nightmares with this software, starting to think I see why...

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Getting de-railed from this at the moment by update-source probs, but I did find a MDK RPM for ndiswrapper 0.8 on the web. I'm not highly keen to go installing before I do some checks on the 0.4 I 'supposedly' uninstalled, though. That one was installed from a local RPM as well, and although there were no apparent blips with the uninstall, I went back into 'install' and still found an entry for it in my local source - even though I'd deleted the RPM from that location!

 

Not wanting to drag this thread off-topic, honest; I just need to get these issues sorted before I can get down to the business in hand. Rest assured, come that time I will be relentless!

 

Will the installation bork if I don't have the kernel source in the location above(or at all)? There was no dependency message or error when I installed the 0.4 version.

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Well I deleted everything I could find leftover of the 0.4 ndiswrapper, namely only the /etc/ndiswrapper folder containing the drivers that were installed there. I'm now slightly regretting not examining the conf files that were in there for clues, but I want to just start over with a clean slate really.

 

So one thing at a time. Any tips on how I can be sure I've completely eradicated any trace of ndiswrapper before I install the new version? And what is the situation with the kernel? I just installed the 2.6.3.15 (and the source), followed by ndiswrapper 0.8 which I've uninstalled again because dmesg returned a line like 'ndiswrapper 0.4 loaded'. I want to be sure I can start afresh, removing anything that might be left in config files and so on before I do so.

 

Any advice what files to examine? I'm still effectively noobish when it comes to networking and hardware issues in general. Any replies greatly appreciated, I know it's becoming an interminable subject but it should be solved once and for all (especially as this is about the cheapest 54g card on the UK market now).

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