!*@*#@! Broadcom 4311 !

So my gf just bought me a new laptop this weekend, bless her heart. She did a good job of spec'ing (dual core, nvidia etc.) and while it's not the model I was planning on buying, it's worked out very well.

However, it has a stupid ***** *** ******* ** ********* ***** broadcom 4311 chipset for wifi. Which is a shame, because everything else that's important works perfectly out of the box, including suspend.

No problems, right? Just use ndiswrapper? Tried that. Including the latest version from sf, and with the actual hp drivers, plus ones from Dell that were also recommended. It works just fine, but as I discovered from some googling there's apparently a bug between the new nvidia driver and the ndiswrapper driver that causes a collision. After about 2 minutes of surfing, if I'm lucky ndiswrapper will crash, if I'm unlucky the nvidia driver crashes locking me in X and forcing a hard reset.

I've gone through the logs, and from googling, I take it there's some issue with ndiswrapper and nvidia being assigned the same irq. The nvidia guys say it's a linux kernel issue. Doesn't help me. I've tried all the usual kernel parameters, like pollirq, noirq and routeirq, sometimes together in different combinations. Doesn't work. Still crashes.

So now I've turned to the bcm43xx drivers, only to find that my chipset is not supported. Am I surprised at this point? I've seen posts and notes from people that have managed to hack, or download a dev kernel to patch, and manage to get it mostly working. I've already killed the weekend on this so I haven't tried that route yet. In fact I'm completely prepared to simply go out and buy an Intel minipci-e wifi board to replace the Broadcom one, only I've now found out that the HP BIOS whitelists their own components and won't allow booting with unauthorized parts. Heavy sigh.

So I'm wondering if, by some sheer stroke of fate, anybody out there has had any success with the bcm43xx drivers and a 4311 chipset? Anybody?

FWIW, the lappie is an HP Pavillion dv6000. Strangely, lspci recognizes the wifi adapter as being a Dell Wireless model.

Any help or advice with either the ndiswrapper issue or bcm43xx would be most appreciated.

Cheers,
KV