Fedora 10 Broadcom 43xx Wireless

Posted: March 8th, 2009 | Author: Matt | Filed under: IT, Linux | Tags: , , , | 4 Comments »

For quite some time now I’ve wanted to run Linux on my personal machine to force me to learn the OS better.  And for the longest time the biggest thing holding me back was getting my wireless card working.

Way back in the day I installed Fedora 6 on a Dell Latitude D800 and spent a solid week trying to get the wireless to work without any luck.  Just a few moments ago I was able to get my wireless card to work on my desktop that has a similar Broadcom 43xx required driver to work with Fedora 10.

After doing some reading I found out that the reason the Broadcom 43xx driver doesn’t work out of the box is because it is a proprietary driver therefore you must download it and use the b43-fwcutter command to extract the driver into the appropriate location.

The b43-fwcutter command should be pre-installed with Fedora 10, but if it isn’t just install it with yum:

sudo yum install b43-fwcutter

Once you have b43-fwcutter it is just a matter of getting the b43xx driver and running the fwcutter tool.

export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"
wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver
sudo b43-fwcutter -w "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR" wl_apsta_mimo.o

Note: the FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR may be slightly different. But it should be set to /lib/firmware as default in Fedora 10.

Finally, you will need to restart you network services.

service network restart

or

/etc/init.d/network restart

I’d like to give all credit to http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware.

Final Note: these instructions were verified to work with Fedora 10 – 2.6.27.19-170.2.35.fc10.i686

4 Comments on “Fedora 10 Broadcom 43xx Wireless”

  1. #1 Han said at 3:48 pm on March 19th, 2009:

    Great! This works perfect on my Dell D800.
    Thanks

    Han

  2. #2 Mark said at 10:07 am on March 24th, 2009:

    Thanks a lot, this works great! You have no earthly idea how long I’ve been trying to do this. I’m assuming this can be done with other Dell laptop provided wireless driver is available.

  3. #3 Livio said at 5:29 pm on December 5th, 2009:

    Attempted install on fedora 11, wireless unit receiving signals but hangs computer when trying to connect, any help appreciated.

  4. #4 Matt said at 9:44 pm on December 8th, 2009:

    Livio, I haven’t had the chance to play around with Fedora 11 yet. I may actually get the chance over the holidays. I’ll try to update my post/write a new post for Fedora 11 when I figure it out.

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