Broadcom wireless on Debian Testing

Robert P. J. Day rpjday-L09J2beyid0N/H6P543EQg at public.gmane.org
Wed Jul 1 16:58:47 UTC 2009


On Wed, 1 Jul 2009, JoeHill wrote:

> Robert P. J. Day wrote:

[referring to http://wiki.debian.org/bcm43xx]

> >   i just followed the same page for a BCM4318 wireless chip on a
> > laptop running debian 5.01 and it worked fine.
>
> The thing I'm not sure about is that the wiki seems to indicate that the
> firmware installation is completely automated, ...

  for me, it was.  first, i made this change to /etc/apt/sources.list:

   deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian lenny main contrib non-free

then ran:

  # apt-get install b43-fwcutter wireless-tools

at which point i was prompted to allow the installation of the actual
firmware.  if memory serves, i simply said yes, away it went and when
it was over, "lsmod" showed me numerous b43-related loaded modules.

  i still had no wireless until i invoked System -> Administration ->
Network.  didn't *do* anything there, just opened it up and closed it
and, suddenly, Network Manager could see the wireless networks in the
area.  i'm not a debian guru so i'm guessing that doing that somehow
ran a combo of iwconfig/ifconfig underneath.  in any event, wireless!
no need to modprobe anything.  surprisingly painless.

  this was all on a gateway mx7120, 64-bit AMD CPU, with BCM3418
802.11g wireless.

rday
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Robert P. J. Day                               Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA

        Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry.

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