Broadcom 4306 Network Controller Not Recognized

[t8rsalad]

I've been trying for probably 10 hours now to get the bcm4306 driver working on Debian. I finally got it installed using ndiswrapper... However, now ndiswrapper says that the hardware is not present! When I run lspci, though, it lists BCM4306 as the network controller. What is going on, and how do I fix it? It's on a Dell latitude D600.

[MikeTbob]

Hello and Welcome.
Try starting off here and see what we can come up with.
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/wir...tart-here.html

[reed9]

Post the info in the wireless sticky as suggested by MikeTbob, but assuming it is a bcm4306, there is a driver included, the b43, but it requires non-free firmware.

While connected to the internet do this

su -
apt-get install b43-fwcutter

Select yes when it asks if you want to download the firmware.

b43-fwcutter is in the contrib section of the repos, which you may not have enabled. If not do

su -
nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Find the line that looks like

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main

and change it to

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

I threw in non-free as well. You can leave it off if you want.

Then (still as root)

apt-get update && apt-get install b43-fwcutter

You will need to remove ndiswrapper or it will conflict with the native b43 driver. Afterwards it should work fine.