Arch Linux

dmays

Member

Registered: 2007-09-17

Posts: 19

enable wireless radio on broadcom card

I recently installed a minipci wireless card in my laptop, but I haven't been able to enable the wireless radio so I can connect to an access point. Whenever I try to scan for APs using "iwlist wlan0 scan", I get "wlan0     No scan results". I'm using the b43 driver and it recognizes my card fine, it just won't enable the radio. There's also no wireless button on the laptop (Compaq Presario r3000), as this model originally came without a wireless card. Anybody have an idea?

Edit: Here's relevant lspci output for my card:

02:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)
        Subsystem: Hewlett-Packard Company Broadcom 802.11b/g WLAN
        Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 64, IRQ 17
        Memory at e8100000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=8K]
        Kernel driver in use: b43-pci-bridge
        Kernel modules: ssb

Last edited by dmays (2008-11-11 13:42:30)

pjjanak

Member

Registered: 2008-08-17

Posts: 128

Re: enable wireless radio on broadcom card

My suggestion is not to use b43, but instead use ndiswrapper. I have found it to much more reliable and able to use the full potential of my Broadcom card (with b43 I could only get 1mb/s connections, but with ndiswrapper I can get the full 54mb/s). There is a decent section on ndiswrapper in the wireless guide linked to by the beginner's guide in the wikis. And the ndiswrapper website has a good driver you can use for bcm cards. So, give it a shot!

Peter

dmays

Member

Registered: 2007-09-17

Posts: 19

Re: enable wireless radio on broadcom card

This is not a driver issue. I found the solution on TechRepublic: since my laptop was not originally configured for wireless and has no wireless radio switch, the only way to turn my wireless card on is to bridge a couple contact points on the wireless card board. Here is the relevant post: http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0 … ID=2316368