[Tfug] bcm4306 wireless

Chad Woolley thewoolleyman at gmail.com
Sun May 28 22:18:08 MST 2006


I think the "luck" part is being lucky enough to have bought the right
card (or a laptop with the right embedded chipset) :)

On 5/27/06, JD Rogers <jdrogers at email.arizona.edu> wrote:
> On 5/27/06, Chad Woolley <thewoolleyman at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Here's a quote from the Linux wireless maintainer at the beginning of
> > the year, who admits "I'm just the defacto guy, with no interest in
> > the job.":
> >
> > "another banner year has passed, with Linux once again proving its
> > superiority in the area of crappy wireless (WiFi) support. Linux
> > oldsters love the current state of wireless, because it hearkens back
> > to the heady days of Yuri Gagarin, Sputnik and Linux kernel 0.99, when
> > getting hardware to work under Linux required either engineering
> > knowledge or luck (or both)."
>
> Egads! Am I one of those? That's pretty funny, but makes a really
> important point. I've been content because I can get my hardware to
> work, but things on the wireless front haven't improved much in the
> last couple years. I for one blame the chip makers. They don't even
> have to spend money to make linux drivers, if they would just release
> good docs and specs so developers could make quicker work of it.
>
> > http://kerneltrap.org/node/6053
> >
> > Linux desktop has come a long way, but things like video and wireless
> > are still archaic, and have a long way to go...
> >
> > -- Chad
> >
> >
> > On 5/26/06, Paul Scott <waterhorse at ultrasw.com> wrote:
> > > Brian Masur wrote:
> > > > My Gateway 7422GX notebook has internal mini-PCI bcm4306.  While it works
> > > > with ndiswrapper (and 64-bit windows driver) it does have some trouble.  It
> > > > often switches off from whatever ESSID it was on to ESSID:NONE/OFF.  The
> > > > only way I can bring it back when it does that is to rmmod/modprobe
> > > > ndiswrapper.  IMO, ndiswrapper is total rubbish.
> > > >
> > > > I would recommend getting a better pcmcia/cardbus adapter like one with an
> > > > orinoco, atheros, or prism chip, (I recommend Senao) or wait until the
> > > > broadcom driver in development is usable/useful.  Yes, there is a broadcom
> > > > driver but it didn't work for me last time I tried, which was at least four
> > > > months ago.  Good luck!
> > > >
> > > Thanks.  Chris Case at Ultramedia thought he was selling me a card with
> > > RaLink RT2500 which is Linux friendly but MSI apparently changed the
> > > chip.  I will probably take it back.  Do you know of any inexpensive
> > > Linux friendly card available locally?
> > >
> > > For now I will at least try to get ndiswrapper going just for
> > > experience.  I also have a Linksys WPC11 ver. 4 which has a Realtek
> > > RTL8180 which requires building a kernel module which I haven't needed
> > > to do since I got a Lucent Winmodem going.
> > >
> > > Thanks again,
> > >
> > > Paul
> > >
> > >
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