Hi,

I've been trying to make Debian 5.0 work well on my laptop. Unfortunately, the most important thing to achieve that, which is to enable my broadcom 4318 wireless pci card, has not taken place. I know I can use ndiswrapper, but I refuse to use it, because from my previous experience using linux (Ubuntu 8.04-8.10, OpenSuSe 11.1 and Fedora 10 briefly), I can simply download the firmware from the linux wireless website and extract it using b43-fwcutter, as follows:

Code:
su
aptitude install b43-fwcutter
tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2/driver
b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o
Although it is able to detect my network, it fails to connect to it everytime. I have wpa_supplicant installed, though my network is only wep encrypted. I have done this many times in the other distros I mentioned without trouble. But in Lenny I get erratic behavior by the wireless card LED, it turns off and on. I did:

Code:
dmesg | grep b43

b43-phy0: Loading firmware version 410.2160 (2007-05-26 15:32:10)
Registered led device: b43-phy0::radio
This output is shown repeatedly (I presume that as a consequence the led goes off and on again)
I don't know if I need something else to make this work...this is my first time with Debian.

So, do I need to install compat-wireless git trees on the 2.6.26 kernel or something? to make it work?

I also haven't tried compiling b43-fwcutter from source. Could this package be causing the trouble?

Any help is appreciated