Broadcom Wireless and Linux

June 10, 2007 1 Comment

Here is the “straightforward” way

see (http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/index.php)
for more info.

  • Download this windows driver
  • unzip the file you downloaded.
  • run “ndiswrapper -i FILE” on any .inf files you downloaded.
  • run “ndiswrapper -l” and it should say “driver present hardware present” if not, there is a problem.

type:

depmod -a
modprobe ndiswrapper

try “ethq wlan0 scan” if it worked, this should do something.

Troubleshooting

With Ubuntu for some reason it loads a bad driver you should blacklist. This issue is covered a bit better here: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=285809

Here’s another issue with Edgy. I got this email from a friend. My Wireless stopped working because the latest version was bad. Probably not an issue now, but if you’re having problems you may want to give it a shot.

hey rich
Speaking of the devil, yeah, i just figured that out like 3 minutes ago. From what i can tell, it seems like the new version of ndiswrapper (like 1.7?) screws things up. Or something. So i just downloaded and installed an older version of ndiswrapper. I got ndwiswrapper-1.27. i just downloaded and extracted the file, didn’t use apt-get. after that:

1. cd to the extracted directory of ndiswrapper-1.27
2. sudo make uninstall (ur supposed to do this until there are no errors…)
3. sudo make
4. sudo make install
5. then just do sudo ndiswrapper -i filename.inf for your driver.

Now mine works again, yay. The problem i had thought was i didn’t have the kernel headers so it wouldn’t compile ndiswrapper. i (eventually) did a sudo apt-get install linux-headers-2.6.17-10-386. Now if you’re running a different version of the kernel, then replace that last string with ur version. the command to get ur exact kernel is “uname -r”. so yeah….do that, then do the make uninstall, make, make install, and then it should work again. I don’t have the link for that 1.27 version download, but google should find it pretty quick.

So in summary, the best solution is probably to get rid of piece of shit broadcom chips :)

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