BCM4318 Wireless

[vicagnews]

Hello,

I have the BCM4318 Wireless card on my Acer Aspire 5000 laptop. I recently installed Ubuntu on it and followed the instructions on this thread:
http://www.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=190177

This got the wireless card working flawlessly. Well that was that, but after some time I was playing around with the Beryl desktop and I crashed Ubuntu. So, I decided to install openSUSE instead ... everything is working fine except the said wireless adapter. I tried the same instructions that were successful with Ubuntu but they did not work because SUSE had already detected the card and installed a set of drivers for it.

So, when I typed:

ndiswrapper -i ~/Desktop/bcmwl5.inf

... it did install the drivers, but when i tried:

ndiswrapper -m

... i got a message saying:

modprobe config already contains alias directive

and when I try:

ndiswrapper -l

.. it shows me two sets of drivers:

bcmwl15 
driver installed; hardware present (alternate driver: bcm43xx)
bcmwl5a 
invalid driver!

I guess this means that there's some sort of a driver conflict which results in my wireless connection not working. Does anyone know how to get rid of the invalid driver and have the wireless connection working properly??

[chay2263]

try the -e command on the unwanted driver. -e is erase.

[chay2263]

Also go the opensuse.org. type in ndiswrapper how to. click on the first link and then click on Ndiswrapper_how to. This solved my problem. I have opensuse 10.2 and I have the exact same wireless card. Mine works flawlessly.

[vicagnews]

Thanks chay ... let me try that!

[vicagnews]

tried everything on that page ... but sadly, nothing worked out ... so I'm back on ubuntu again!

thanks all the same!

-vic

[bryansmith]

Just as a note - bcm43xx drivers are in the kernel (assuming your distro builds it in). So, you may in fact have the drivers you need already. In that case, you only need to get the firmware - that can be done with a tool called bcm43xx-fwcutter.

The 4318 is still unstable at this point but if you look here, some cards are supported.

This way is much easier than ndiswrapper...trust me.

[vicagnews]

Thanks Bryan ... I will try that the next time I install SUSE ... for now, i'm back with Ubuntu and the ndiswrapper procedure works fine with this one.

But, thanks again ... I really appreciate your help!

- Vic