Wireless with the BCM43xx in Fedora 10

Unfortunately, the BCM43xx series of wireless cards is very popular in laptops today, but thankfully the popularity is decreasing. Fedora 10 is actually not difficult, but harder than Ubuntu, to use the BCM43xx cards.

Make sure you have root access. This cannot be performed without root access. This is for firmware version 4 and higher, my Acer Aspire 3690 used that firmware, so this is what I’m giving instructions for.
yum install b43-fwcutter

cd /tmp

wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

bunzip2 broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

tar xvf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar

b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/wl_apsta_mimo.o

echo “alias wlan0 b43” >> /etc/modprobe.conf

system-network-config

I should have an external hard drive tomorrow so that I can install Fedora 10 then I’ll correct these instructions. For some reason my internal card doesn’t like these drivers (last I checked) but it likes the Windows drivers, so I may use ndiswrapper. Who knows?

A large majority of the post was forked from http://fedoramobile.org/fc-wireless/bcm43xx-yum-extras.

One thought on “Wireless with the BCM43xx in Fedora 10”

  1. In Fedora 11, you will have to do a yum install wget first, but not a yum install b43-fwcutter and use system-config-network instead of system-network-config.

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