View Single Post

   
  #2 (permalink)  
Old 01-19-2008, 06:55 AM
Floyd L. Davidson
 
Posts: n/a
Default Re: Ndiswrapper with broadcom bcm inbuilt wireless

Kemal Celebi <kemal-nospam@spam.invalid> wrote:
>hi
>
>i just left microsoft xp behind and installed debian testing on my hp
>pavilion zx5000 notebook with the help of my friend. this laptop has an
>inbuilt wireless card which shows up as (my friend's idea) :
>
>0000:02:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g
>Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)


Typical of HP laptops... :-)

>i used ndiswrapper to install the windows driver from the cdrom :
>
>/home/kemal# ndiswrapper -i /media/cdrom0/SWSetup/WLAN1/bcmwl5.inf


okay... that installed ndiswrapper>

>/home/kemal# ndiswrapper -l
>Installed ndis drivers:
>bcmwl5 driver present, hardware present


And this told you it is now available>

>how do i get the interface wlan0 to come up ?


Follow the rest of the instructions??? As someone else
recommends, reading the instructions is always a good idea.
All you are missing is

modprobe ndiswrapper

which you can do manually the first time, just to see if it
works. But then you need that to be done automatically at boot
time. That is specific to your particular distribution, and I
have no idea how debian does it. Regardless, it can't be too
difficult to figure out how a new module is added to the mix
with debian.

But there are a couple other things you might want to think
about as soon as you get it to work (or sooner if the above
modprobe fails).

Note on the web site for docs it says *not* to use the driver
off your CD, but to download a known to work version list at a
specified URL. Generally that is a good idea, though with the
Broadcom/HP mix I don't think you'll have a problem. Otherwise,
these drivers don't change names with different versions, and
there are several slightly different bcmwl5 drivers around. If
I remember right (without looking) there is also a bcmwl5a
driver that worked on my HP laptop too.

If you do have the source code to you linux kernel and have
compiled it (and if you haven't compiled a customized kernel,
you *should*), then you should find the latest version of
ndiswrapper and the latest wireless tools package, and compile
those for use if the one you have is not the same.

--
Floyd L. Davidson <http://web.newsguy.com/floyd_davidson>
Ukpeagvik (Barrow, Alaska) floyd@barrow.com
Reply With Quote