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Re: [LUG] Mint 9 and wifi

 
On Thu, 28 Oct 2010, Neil Winchurst wrote:


On 27/10/10 17:43, Rob Beard wrote:

I have a feeling that the Broadcom BCM 4318 is your wifi card and may
need a firmware or proprietary driver. I'm in the process of fixing a
laptop for a friend which also has a Broadcom wifi card (not sure if
it's the same one mind) and when booting in Ubuntu 10.04 it comes up
with a message saying that something is required, I think it may be a
restricted driver.

This forum post covers this particular card on Ubuntu 10.04 (which I
believe Mint 9 is based on):

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1507981

Doing a search on Ubuntu 10.10 I find that there is a package
firmware-b43-installer in the repositories which is an installer package
for the firmware for this wifi card although on the forum post someone
suggests installing b43-fwcutter.

Of course to download these packages you'll need to plug your machine
into a wired network connection (the Realtek 8139 wired ethernet should
be supported out of the box).

Hope this helps.

Rob
Thanks for the help. I will do some research. What surprises me is that I had no problem with Mint v7. Both Ethernet and Wifi just worked. Now I have installed v9 I am having problems.
Perhaps they are working on the system so beloved of our politicians. Does it work? Yes? Oh well, we had better change it then.
A lot might depends on how "free" Mint is. The Broadcom driver is free - it's in the kernel, but you need some proprietary code which isn't - that needs to be loaded into the chipset at boot time - that's what fw-cutter is for - I think you need a copy of the windows driver to feed into it so it extracts the firmware.
I suspect early versions of Mint just indluded the code - against the copyright/whatever and not fully in the spirit of "free"... So there appears to be a regression.
I use a braodcom chipset on my latop with Debian Lenny, but I needed to feed the windows driver into the fw-cutter, or something, but it's been so-long since I set it up, I've forgotten the exact sequence... 

Gordon

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