I decided to try the upcoming Ubuntu 7.04 release, The Feisty Fawn. What I immediately noticed was that the new bcm43xx driver only supports the new 4.x release of the drivers. The problem though was that it is not very easy to find. The links in the README file did not work any longer.
It seems that Microsoft has this driver in their software catalog, so head over there and download it. The filename is 12002219.cab. Once you have it downloaded just extract it using cabextract.
Using bcm43xx-fwcutter to get the firmware itself, will enable you to use the bcm43xx driver. You will need to execute this in the directory where you extracted the cab.
sudo bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware bcmwl5.sys
Now if you load the bcm43xx module, you should hopefully be all set.
It seems like the driver caused my computer to crash on occasion, so be warned.
Not only did the driver crash, it didn’t support WPA for some reason, so I needed another approach. The bcm43xx driver just won’t cut it, so after a quick installation of ndiswrapper and setting the ndiswrapper driver all was better.
sudo echo “alias eth1 ndiswrapper” > /etc/modprobe.d/ndiswrapper
Using the same 4.x driver as above, install it using.
$ sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
installing bcmwl5 …
forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
forcing parameter IBSSGMode from 0 to 2
…
Run the following to verify that the driver works.
$ sudo ndiswrapper -l
installed drivers:
bcmwl5 driver installed, hardware (14E4:4324) present (alternate driver: bcm43xx)
Now just load the ndiswrapper driver and voila, instant access to WPA/WPA2 using network manager.
Marvelous.
could you offer a link to that file other than the one hidden within the clutches of microsoft? For those of us that wont use IE we can’t access that page to download the file…
thank you
[quote comment=”18860″]could you offer a link to that file other than the one hidden within the clutches of microsoft? For those of us that wont use IE we can’t access that page to download the file…
thank you[/quote]
I’m not sure about the license, so I can’t upload it. A little bird told me though, that the file can be found here:
http://www.sharebigfile.com/file/89658/12002219-cab.html
I cannot select any wpa in my gnome-network-manager; just wep in ascii or in hex. I use bcm43xx driver to connect, I can see the network using wifi-radar with no problem.
Do I need to install anything else? I also have wpasupplicant.
thanks
PD: My network applet is slightly diferent, and I didn’t find any way to change that
[quote comment=”29659″]I cannot select any wpa in my gnome-network-manager; just wep in ascii or in hex. I use bcm43xx driver to connect, I can see the network using wifi-radar with no problem.
Do I need to install anything else? I also have wpasupplicant.
thanks
PD: My network applet is slightly diferent, and I didn’t find any way to change that[/quote]
Are you using Feisty? In that case, it should work if you have all the latest updates. Network manager has changed somewhat since this article was written, so it’s not very strange that your applet looks different.
This article is a bit old now like I said, but it does say this:
“Not only did the driver crash, it didn’t support WPA for some reason”
So, maybe you could try using ndiswrapper instead if you can’t make the bcm43xx-driver work. I haven’t tried the bcm43xx module for a while, but I guess it should be working this close to release. Have you tried removing the old driver, reinstall bcm43xx-fwcutter and let it download and install the driver automatically?
Oh, and you should probably uninstall wifi-radar too, since it is might interfere with Network Manager.