Wireless Howto: Bcm43xx With Ndiswrapper

wireless (bcm43xx)

the hp nx6325 laptop comes with the notorious bcm4312 chip. the driver that is included in the kernel doesn’t work, fwcutter doesn’t solve the problem either. you have to use the windows driver with ndiswrapper. make sure ndiswrapper is installed.

first, get the windows driver and unpack it

http://unet.univie.ac.at/~a0201073/bcm4310.tar.gz
for me, the driver from hp’s website didn’t work.

become root

run lsmod
to see if bcm43xx is loaded. we don’t want to have it as it interferes with ndiswrapper. if you see bcm43xx in the list,

rmmod bcm43xx

load the driver to ndiswrapper

ndiswrapper -i /home/yourname/bcm4310/bcmwl5.inf

load ndiswrapper

modprobe -i ndiswrapper

the wlan led should now be on. you can use gnome’s (or kde’s) network manager to configure your wireless network. but we’re not done yet…

you need to permanently remove the bcm43xx from the kernel, simply blacklisting it is not enough as it will load at boot. you can find the module under

lib/modules/kernel_version/kernel/drivers/net/wireless

delete it or, if you feel better, back it up to your home folder.

now we need to make ndiswrapper load at boot.

open yast, go to /etc/sysconfig editor. go to system, kernel, modules loaded on boot and add
ndiswrapper

-------

you can also find this howto on my blog: http://imrek.wordpress.com

Hello

I'm having problems installing this driver on my NX6325. I get to the "modprobe -i ndiswrapper" which tells me
FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.22.9-0.4-bigsmp/modules.dep: No such file or directory


What can the problem be?

I also had a look at your blog on imrek.wordpress.com before it got deleted. Can you please post the rest of it so i can get my fan working?

Chaser

I'm having problems installing this driver on my NX6325. I get to the "modprobe -i ndiswrapper" which tells me
FATAL: Could not load /lib/modules/2.6.22.9-0.4-bigsmp/modules.dep: No such file or directory
[/b]

Just use "modprobe ndiswrapper" - no need to use the -i.

~~ Andrew D.

Tried that, got this

Barbar:/home/torbjorn # modprobe ndiswrapper
FATAL: Module ndiswrapper not found.

Figured out that there was only a 1.47 in the standard repos, so I am gona try out your guide in installing ndiswrapper

Chaser

Update

I tried out your guide now. Didn't find NDISGTK but I perume that I can use NDISInstaller insted. I added the driver and I get this message:

There has been an Error during the installation Process. The Error was: Compilation error.

What can the problem be?

Chaser