so i’ve heard from numerous people complain about the difficulty of broadcom wireless cards on linux, and i agree, it was not anything straigtforward.


After finding b43 info on linuxwireless.org i took there pasted info on

0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11a/b/g (rev 01)

and pasted it to a simple shell script

wget http://bu3sch.de/b43/fwcutter/b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
tar xjf b43-fwcutter-011.tar.bz2
cd b43-fwcutter-011
make
cd ..
export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR=”/lib/firmware”
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod
sudo ../../b43-fwcutter-011/b43-fwcutter -w “$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR” wl_apsta.o

while that was going on, i built the latestwicd in the SlackBuilds.org 12.1 repo, you can go here


after adding /etc/rc.d/rc.wicd to rc.local to start on boot, i rebooted, and magically networks are discoverd and availble to connect to !
i’m only on a WEP network right now, so maybe i’ll have some issues when i need wpa, but for now, we’re gravy.

vb