[ravegrunt]

I am having a similar issue, I have a Studio 17 (Dell) LSPCI says I have:

Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g [14e4:4315]

Working under DL 3.5 XFCE Flavor, just installed today.

"sudo b43load b43" loads the modules (as confirmed by lsmod) however iwconfig and ifconfig don't see it. Another, older, thread (http://dreamlinuxforums.org/index.php/topic,5184.0.html) suggests turning off Bluetooth, which I have done. So far, I got nothing at all.

The OP here had a good solid attempt - which also miserably failed. Even still, won't recognize the card.

I have tried a X reboot, tried a full reboot, wrote b43 into /etc/modules, attempting to appease the Linux gods by burning old Windows 95 CDs, all of which are coming to the same resolution - no wireless.

I have no ethernet access here, so I can't try the tradition apt-get upgrade and hope it works...

Anyone wanna help my Christmas be a little merrier?

Thanks for the help

[richs-lxh]

Hi Ravegrunt, welcome to Dreamlinux forums.

I split your post so that you have your own thread, and things don't get confusing.

Basically, Dreamlinux has Broadcom firmware/drivers out of the box, so in theory yours should work. The trouble with wireless and graphics cards is that the manufacturers don't keep to a standard or offer up enough Linux native drivers for all the 100's of varieties of cards.

It appears that you have tried everything you can, which leads me to believe that you have an incompatible "variety". There are various subtle differences with Broadcom chipsets, including different revisions (rev1, rev2 etc).

All w ecan do is rely on the reverse-engineered drivers that are provided, so it's not really a Dreamlinux prblem, but a Linux problem.

Have you gotten the card to work with any other distros?

[gs]

this keeps up appearing in many forums.
The bcm4312 as used in many notebooks and netbooks does not work with the bcm43.......

You may read wiki.debian.org/wl and do what is suggested there to get the wl-driver installed.
You may see this does  work.......

Prerequisite: gain internet access by LAN or another Wlan-card in order to download the things required...

[ravegrunt]

It works in Windows as well as 64-bit version of Ubuntu 9.10.

I will give the wl idea a shot, and let you know how it goes!

[ravegrunt]

Okay, so here we go:

After researching through debian articles, Ubuntu articles, etc I found that the STA driver from Broadcom is the ONLY way with the low powered 4312 cards (as are on most of Dell's new machines)

http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php

The single most important step is to admit you have wl already installed, followed the README and at this part:

# rmmod wl
# mv <path-to-prev-driver>/wl.ko <path-to-prev-driver>/wl.ko.orig
# cp wl.ko <path-to-prev-driver>/wl.ko
# depmod
# modprobe wl

Follow that to a T. (The path is /lib/modules/2.6.28.5-1-i686-dream/kernel/net/wireless)

After a modprobe, I had to reload, attempt to get on my wireless network, reboot, then it found it and grabbed an IP without any issue.

Done and done.