My Dell Inspiron B130 laptop has a 1470 wireless card (BCM 4311 (Air Force 54G) 802.11a/b/g PCI). I just installed openSuse 11.1, dual booted with XP, but Suse cannot see the wireless card. I read in the openSuse HCL list here: HCL/Network Adapters (Wireless)/Broadcom BCM43xx - openSUSE
how to download good Broadcom drivers from the Linux Wireless project.
I have two questions:
The first page refers to downloading a firmware blob. If I install the firmware to the card, will it then stop working on the Windows side?
Next it says to get online and run the script install_bcm43xx_firmware. This will download and self install. Catch 22: If Suse can’t use the wireless card, how am I to get online to download this file?
wildad wrote:
> My Dell Inspiron B130 laptop has a 1470 wireless card (BCM 4311 (Air
> Force 54G) 802.11a/b/g PCI). I just installed openSuse 11.1, dual booted
> with XP, but Suse cannot see the wireless card. I read in the openSuse
> HCL list here: ‘HCL/Network Adapters (Wireless)/Broadcom BCM43xx -
> openSUSE’ (http://tinyurl.com/9dy9d3)
> how to download good Broadcom drivers from the Linux Wireless project.
> I have two questions:
The b43 driver in openSUSE will drive your device. You do not need to download a
driver, just firmware. If you want to know the difference, that is covered in
the stickies.
> 1. The first page refers to downloading a firmware blob. If I install
> the firmware to the card, will it then stop working on the Windows
> side?
The firmware is the code used by the CPU on the card. It is reloaded everytime
the driver is initialized. It will not interfere with Windows.
> 2. Next it says to get online and run the script
> install_bcm43xx_firmware. This will download and self install. Catch 22:
> If Suse can’t use the wireless card, how am I to get online to download
> this file?
If you read the stickies at the start of this forum, the technique to sneakernet
the necessary file into Linux is described.
Thanks for the guidance.
Based on the following I could see that I am missing the firmware.
linux-414x:/ # dmesg | grep firmware
firmware: requesting b43/ucode5.fw
b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to b43 - Linux Wireless and download the latest firmware (version 4).
firmware: requesting b43/ucode5.fw
b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to b43 - Linux Wireless and download the latest firmware (version 4).
firmware: requesting b43/ucode5.fw
b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to b43 - Linux Wireless and download the latest firmware (version 4).
firmware: requesting b43/ucode5.fw
b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to b43 - Linux Wireless and download the latest firmware (version 4).
firmware: requesting b43/ucode5.fw
b43-phy0 ERROR: You must go to b43 - Linux Wireless and download the latest firmware (version 4).
So, On my other computer I went to linuxwireless and downloaded fwcutter and the broadcom driver tar files, which I copied to a flash drive, then over to /user/bin. I then ran the Suse script and got the following.
linux-414x:/ # usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware
Downloading b43 firmware
curl: (6) Couldn’t resolve host ‘mirror2.openwrt.org’
Could not download b43 firmware. Please look at /usr/share/doc/packages/b43-fwcutter/README.
Apparently the script insists on looking online, which it can’t yet do.
Next I tried to install the firmware following the procedure from the Linuxwirelsss site.
linux-414x:/usr/sbin # tar xfj broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
linux-414x:/usr/sbin # cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver
linux-414x:/usr/sbin/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver # b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o
-bash: b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter: No such file or directory
I do not understand all of the last command nor the results. Where should I go from here?
Read the stickies at the start of the wireless forum to see how to generate the
firmware when you have to sneakernet the file rather than download it the way
the the script /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware.
The error is due to an incorrect path to b43-fwcutter.
You have one other option - run the script above on the computer with network
access, then copy the files in /lib/firmware/b43 to the other one.
to attempt to install the firmware if you do not have an internet connection to your computer, the golden secret is I believe carried deep within DELTAFLYER’s stickie;
These three commands will skip the download step and extract the firmware in the same way that the /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware does.
Note: If the output of ‘lspci -v’ indicates that you have a BCM4310, BCM4328 or BCM4329, this procedure will not work. For those cases, you will need the Windows driver and ndiswrapper.
the howto is NOT in either of Larry’s stickies, excellent and comprehensive as they are in every other way: