Broadcom is a secretly microsoft owned company that makes cards that don't work in linux.
The most spastic thing is that you can get your card working in a previous release of your favourite distribution after performing various hacks, search the web , deciding who is closer to the solution, but not on the new release .
update after half an hour:
Finally got it working - again - .
On a dell latitude d830 with a Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11a/b/g (rev 01) wireless card and mint 5.0 elyssa (based on ubuntu 8.04 hardy).
Seemed that neither ndiswrapper was necessary for rev 01 (issue a lspci command to find your model).
I installed through the hardware drivers gui tool the driver for broadcom.
The caveat was that despite the wi-fi led being on , the bluetooth led should be on too for the wireless to work.
So don't forget to open the bluetooth switch on the left side of the laptop.
I have a Broadcom wireless card for my desktop and although it seems that it's working fine and detecting many wireless points near my house i can't connect to any of them with or without security!
Please if you or anyone else in here knows something that i can do to solve this tell me!
I'm using Ubuntu Hardy 8.04 if this helps you more!
Thank you!
Test your card with a wifi router - access point that you know you can connect to. What we discovered the other day was that vivodi routers for example do not let you connect to their wireless interface if you have not connected to the wired before.
Commands that may be prove useful in this situation are
sudo /etc/init.d/networking restart # to restart the network from command line and see any diagnostic messages there.
ifdown , ifup # to stop or start one interface e.g. you can try to stop the ethernet interface with sudo ifdown eth0
ifconfig #to see what ip address your card has or obtained through dhcp
ping # of course to test that you can ping your gateway
route # to see the gateway assigned through dhcp
Thanks for the help thk!
and add a line in the form:
auto wlan0
this depends by the name of your wireless device , maybe it is assigned as eth1 , so you ll have to add a line: auto eth1. To see the name of it, while the wireless is on issue :
ifconfig