Tech Chorus

Broadcom provides Linux drivers for most of its wireless chipsets. Prior to the release of official drivers from Broadcom, the open source software community had various workarounds. Some people used Windows drivers through ndiswrapper. Others used fwcutter.

The RPM Fusion Repository for Fedora offers the Broadcom wireless drivers from its repositories. You can install them using yum.

Step 1: Enable the RPM Fusion repositories

 
rpm -Uvh <a href="http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm<br />
rpm" title="http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm<br />
rpm">http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable...</a> -Uvh http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm

Step 2: Update the system

yum update

Step 3: Install the Broadcom wireless driver

yum install kmod-wl-PAE

Restart the computer. Network manager must now show the available wireless networks.

Notes

• Make sure the laptop wireless switch is on.
• If you have previously tried installing fwcutter or Broadcom Windows driver via ndiswrapper blacklist these drivers. The steps described in this article has been tested on fresh Fedora 12 install.
• Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01) wireless chipset was used for testing
• To view the chipset details run the command 'lspci'
• If you do not have a PAE kernel, use the command
  

  yum install mkod-wl

  
  instead