[ale] help me convert a non-believer

[Greg Freemyer]

On Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 5:21 PM, Brian Pitts <brian at polibyte.com> wrote:
> On 11/13/2009 10:36 AM, Asher Vilensky wrote:
>> I finally convinced one of my Windoaz friends to try Linux (he got tired
>> of his daughter trashing Vista and he has to deal with it).  Anyway, I
>> recommended Mint.  The poor guy is running into problems with the
>> wireless recognition.  Here's a quote:
>>
>> /Well, I can't get it connected via wireless...wired is fine, and the
>> router DHCP list shows it, but it won't connect.../
>>
>> /so, I'm reading in the Mint forum and folks are talking about what they
>> did to get wireless working on their Dell 1525 which has a Broadcom chip
>> that someone only wrote a replacement for back in Sept. And I can't make
>> heads or tails of
>> it....grrr...http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Download...down at the
>> Bleeding Edge area, talks about tarballs etc...Be sure you have your
>> kernel headers installed first...WTF ?!?!/
>
> He needs to find out exactly which broadcom wifi chip he has. He can do
> this with the lscpi command. If it is listed as supported [0] then
> likely he just needs to connect to the wired network and install the
> package b43-fwcutter. If it is not supported, he'll need to try to
> windows driver through ndiswrapper. All of this is documented in the
> Ubuntu community documentation. [1]
>
> [0] http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#Known_PCI_devices
> [1] https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx
>

I'm a opensuse user, but opensuse allows the Broadcom provided STA
driver to be used.

Per opensuse the native b43-fwcutter solution is preferred, but if it
can't work, the second choice is the STA driver.  The third choice is
ndiswrapper.

http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

fyi: For opensuse, the STA driver is provided in the packman repo,
which is repo they use for codecs etc. that are not fully OSS.

Greg