[SOLVED] Old broadcom hardware and firmware

[trinidad]

I have an old dell inspiron 1150 that I use to torture myself with the available broadcom binaries for ethernet and wlan mini pci cards, loading different distros to it just for entertainment. I have recently loaded kubuntu to it with the .51 kernel but began that a couple of weeks ago with 14.04 and upgraded after the on board wifi worked.

Debian does not recommend the method I used to compile the drivers from the binaries, but I went ahead ignoring their recomendation of alien coversion to debian first, and simply updated the rpm files, and used the redhat version to compile the binaries. All is well with the kubuntu. I also can use forg and gopher on the same system. Now I have managed to get back box at the same stopping point on the old dell, but have been unable so far to get the binaries to compile. BCM4401 100baseT is dated enough to have been fairly esoteric until recently but as I said I enjoy the puzzle of workarounds. Rhel seemed like the simplest way but so far no success. This is the first time I have ever had any difficulty with back box and firmware, as most of the time it simply hooks up.

Thus it earned the test run on the old dell. This is not a question of how for me, but a question of straightforward, which is always the best way with broadcom binaries for average users. When I am satisfied with what I think is the simplest solution I will post the results, as compiling any available brcm binaries will all work the same way and I enjoy resurrecting old boxes and tops for people, and broadcom has been a pain to clickers for quite sometime, and the instructions are a bit beyond ordinary mouse clickers, but it's those clickers that keep this whole goofy consumer based thing going.

As far as I know there is no support for these old cards in the kernels other than 43xxx and 57xxx and up, the latter using tigon3 for drivers in the new kernels. Anyway I'm Trinidad and my English is quite a bit better than my Spanish.      

[ostendali]

welcome to the community first of all...

In relation to the issue you are having, the simple conversion of redhat (pre-compiled) binaries won't solve your problem which in 80% of cases will fail. You had that 20% of chances when you used that with kubuntu and we have no information so far what specs you had with that kubuntu.

However, said that, you will need to provide us more information about your wifi device in order for us to help. Converting rpms-deb that is not what we do but we build deb and rpms:-)

pls follow the instructions in this link http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-find-wireless-driver-chipset/ and provide us the output.

After that we maybe can help.

Ciao