BCM 4318 Native Drivers

[RobinVossen]

Hello, I am running Gentoo and I have been looking for the BCM 4318 (AirForce One 54G) Native Drives.
But well they say to be unstable.
So Id like to know, how stable are they?
Has someone used them before? How good do they work?
Do you recommend Ndiswrapper?
I prefer to ask this instead of trying it out since the Idea is that I am going to work home for a while.
And, if my WiFi fails during it can cost the Company alot.

Hope somebody knows.

Cheers,
Robin

[valemon]

I never managed to get the bmc4318 working with the native drivers with every single distro I 've messed with. I vote for ndiswrapper. Just my opinion

[waterhead]

By native drivers I assume that you are referring to the bcm43xx driver and the newer b43 driver.

I have used the bcm43xx driver, and yes, it works. I was limited to a maximum bandwith of 11Mbs with it. Maybe the newer b43 is better, if you would like to try it and report back to us, that would be great.

If your not into experimentation right now, go with the windows driver and NDISwrapper. I get the full 54Mbs bandwith using it. It is usually a simple install. I use NetworkManager (and KNetworkManager) to connect, and it is almost fool proof (with me being the fool).

[Dapper Dan]

My wife's laptop uses a Hawking PCMCIA card with the broadcom chipset. It has performed extremely well using Ndiswrapper for a couple of years now. Never tried it with bcm43xx.

[HW_Hack]

IMHO the 4318 is the anti-christ of wireless chipsets - I briefly got mine working (running Ubuntu) using the native driver and the 43xx-fwcutter method. But as noted I was limited to 11mbs. I believe the ndiswrapper is better

As I advised elsewhere ----- closely following the sticky thread and using the wiki at the ndiswrapper site will work --- but take it slowly and read

The one step they don't really cover is to remove your native driver by blacklisting it.
Edit /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

add the line blacklist bcm43xx

then reboot and proceed