BCM4306

[Larry Finger]

On 01/26/2013 10:05 PM, stosss wrote:
> On Sat, Jan 26, 2013 at 10:46 PM, Larry Finger
> <Larry.Finger at lwfinger.net> wrote:
>> On 01/26/2013 09:34 PM, stosss wrote:
>>>
>>> Following the instructions from
>>> http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
>>>
>>> lspci -vnn -d 14e4:
>>>
>>> 0b:03.0 Network controller [0280]: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306
>>> 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller [14e4:4320] (rev 03)
>>>                Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Broadcom  802.11b/g
>>> WLAN [103c:12f8]
>>>                Flags: fast devsel, IRQ 5
>>>                Memory at c8206000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [disabled]
>>> [size=8k]
>>>                Kernel modules: ssb
>>>
>>>
>>> PCI-ID          Supported       Chip ID         Modes    PHY version
>>> 14e4:4320       yes            BCM4306/3         ?            G (r2)
>>>
>>> Device firmware installation
>>>
>>> The Broadcom wireless chip needs proprietary software (called
>>> "firmware") that runs on the wireless chip itself to work properly.
>>> This firmware is copyrighted by Broadcom and must be extracted from
>>> Broadcom's proprietary drivers. To get such firmware on your system,
>>> you must download the driver from a legal distribution point, extract
>>> it, and install it. This is accomplished different ways by different
>>> Linux distributions, so please read the section for yours for the best
>>> results. You will need an alternate working internet connection (by
>>> Ethernet cable, for example) since the firmware cannot be included
>>> with the distro itself.
>>>
>>> Post details for missing distributions at b43-dev at lists.infradead.org.
>>> Note: the firmware from the binary drivers is copyrighted by Broadcom
>>> Corporation and cannot be redistributed.
>>>
>>> I have been to the broadcom site. I have found and downloaded files
>>> from the broadcom site and a couple other sites that are for the
>>> bcm4306.
>>>
>>> I am running PCLinuxOS which is a combination of Mandriva, Ubuntu,
>>> Debian and a few other distributions.
>>>
>>> I have installed from the distribution repo
>>> b43-firmware
>>> b43-fwcutter
>>> b43legacy-firmware
>>> bcm43xx-firmware
>>> bcm43-fwcutter
>>> dkms-broadcom-wl
>>>
>>> According to the info above this chip should work. Something is
>>> missing but I don't know what it is.
>>>
>>> There are three windows drivers that show up with ndiswrapper -l that
>>> should work as well but they don't either.
>>>
>>> I don't know what else to check or do. Do I need to black list the
>>> Kernel module ssb ? I have tried to get a Linux or windows driver to
>>> work and I have tried several things even uninstalling all drivers and
>>> then installing the ones listed above.
>>>
>>> It would be awesome if someone could tell me what I haven't done that
>>> I need to do and point me to a workable solution.
>>
>>
>> Did you run b43-fwcutter to extract the firmware?
>
> I don't know what to do here or if I need to.
>
>> Do you have files in directory /lib/firmware/b43/?
>
> Yes, all of them end in .fw the b43-firmware is provided by the the
> distribution repo. I am assuming that it, too, has a script similar to
> the one with your distribution. There have been several from the
> distro forum who have used a few methods to achieve success on their
> systems but none of their suggestions have worked for me. Maybe
> because I need to run that b43-fwcutter but I don't know what file to
> use it on. If I knew the answer to that I might have the problem
> solved.
>
>> I use the openSUSE distro, which includes a script
>> /usr/sbin/install_bcm43xx_firmware that downloads the necessary Broadcom
>> driver file, extracts the firmware using fwcutter, and writes the files to
>> the firmware directory. I have no idea how PCLinuxOS does it.
>
> I was actually considering installing openSUSE on the laptop that I am
> having the problem on. To see if I could resolve the problem. I saw it
> listed as one specifically referenced on
> thehttp://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43 site.

If you have the firmware files loaded in /lib/firmware/b43/, then you need not 
do anything else related to firmware. Please run the following 2 commands, and 
then look at the end of the dmesg output:

sudo /sbin/modprobe -rv b43
sudo /sbin/modprobe -v b43
iwconfig

Larry