#Broadcom wireless adapter driver install
#Broadcom wireless adapter driver drivers
#Broadcom wireless adapter driver driver
#Broadcom wireless adapter driver plus

#Broadcom wireless adapter driver driver

Just continue using the STA driver and everything will work. Note for users for Ubuntu and derivatives, the current release (10.10 Maverick Meerkat, Linux Mint 10, Pinguy 10.10.1 etc.) does NOT include the brcm80211 driver, so installing the firmware files will not produce any useful results. Although the driver seems to be included in the latest openSuSE factory (11.4 Milestone 5) distributions, I have not been able to get it to work, even when given the correct firmware files.

#Broadcom wireless adapter driver install

On Mint Debian you have to install the brcm80211 firmware package (via Synaptic), but on MEPIS it just works out of the box. My best results with this so far have been on the latest Linux Mint Debian distributions and the SimplyMEPIS 11 Beta distribution. The 'correct' driver is supposed to be the brcm80211 driver which was recently released by Broadcom, but that is still percolating its way through various distributions. It does NOT work with the b43 driver mentioned above, and as I said although it does work with the STA driver on Ubuntu (and derivatives) and PCLinuxOS, I have not been able to get it to work consistently with the STA/wl driver on other distributions. 4313: This is the 'new generation' Broadcom adapter, which has been in the two most recent netbooks I have purchased. In my experience, this driver also works for the Broadcom 4313 adapter, but so far I have only been able to use it reliably, and keep it working across kernel updates, on Ubuntu, where it is offered as the only option for that card anyway, and PCLinuxOS, where it just works, even on the Live distribution, using the 'wl' driver. It is offered, under the name 'STA', by the Ubuntu 'Hardware Drivers' utility, and can be obtained for Fedora from the Fedora Unity web site, or for openSuSE from the PackMan web site. As far as I can tell, all of those names refer to the same driver. The second driver for this adapter is variously called the 'wl', 'broadcom-wl' or 'STA' driver. I don't know if this is unique to the 2133, but I know that there were also a lot of problems early in the Fedora 14 pre-release (Alpha/Beta stages) which were caused by the b43 driver. BE CAREFUL - at least on the HP 2133 this driver causes a LOT of problems, especially with freezing the entire system. Ubuntu offers this as one of the choices in 'Additional Hardware Drivers', openSuSE includes a script to get the firmware (install_bcm43xx_firmware), while others will require a visit to the MadWiFi web site to pick up the latest firmware. The driver is generally included in newer Linux distributions, but it might be necessary to download and install the firmware files. One is generally called the 'b43' driver, and uses firmware files which are found in /lib/firmware/b43.

#Broadcom wireless adapter driver drivers

4312: There are two Linux drivers available for this adapter.

This, combined with the general difficulties with the b43 driver for the older chips, and the fact that the open source driver is still in 'staging', is not generally available in all Linux distributions and does not yet work in some where it is included, make for quite a mess. As far as I understand it, after having read as much as I can find about the newly released Broadcom open source driver, the 4313 and subsequent adapters are supported by the new driver, but the 4312 and previous adapters are not.

These two adapters are very different from each other, both internally and in the drivers they use.

#Broadcom wireless adapter driver plus

But as the owner of several Broadcom-equipped systems I find the current situation to be a bit of a minefield, so I'm going to write down a few notes about what I had experienced so far.įor purposes of this discussion, I have systems with two different Broadcom adapters - the 4312, such as is in my HP 2133 Mini-Note, and the 4313, such as in my Samsung N150 Plus and Lenovo S10-3s. This is, undoubtedly, a good thing and it will yield significant long-term benefits for Linux users. There has been quite a bit of discussion and celebration in the Linux community recently because Broadcom released an open-source driver for their wireless networking adapters.