charm

This is an informal how-to on how to get the internal Broadcom 4319 wireless working under Fedora Core 6. My notebook is a Lenovo 3000 C100 notebook with a 1.5GHz processor 512MB RAM and an 80GB hard drive.I searched a number of pages in vain trying ndiswrapper, switching eth1 to wlan0, and doing generally dumb things. I ended up finding a site that I wish I could find again that lead me to the solution. When I do I’ll post credit here.

First step is to download and install bcm43xx-fwcutter package. I found one at rpmseek.com. Step two is getting the a driver with firmware that works. The one that came with my Lenovo 3000 C100 didn’t. You can find a copy of the firmware driver that worked for me on the site I originally posted this howto:

http://www.linux-games.ca/?p=88

The next step is to use bcm43xx-fwcutter to to install the firmware. Untar the wl_apsta.o.tar.gz package:

$ tar -zxvf wl_apsta.o.tar.gz

It’s actually just a single file wl_apsta.o. Now we can use the bcm43xx-fwcutter program to install the firmware in the appropriate area (do this as root):

# bcm43xx-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta.o

# depmod -a

# modprobe bcm43xx

The next step is to click System -> Administration -> Network. I deleted the eth1 device, clicked new, wireless, selected my broadcom, accepted the defaults, and when I clicked activate, voila, working wireless!

If this helps you, please let me know!