Fedora 8 - bcm43xx - NDISWrapper

This article is applicable to people who want to use a Windows wireless driver, instead of bcm43xx or a derivative. The benefit is usually increased performance.

The bcm43xx Firmware does not operate at 54 Mb/s therefore the windows driver can be utilize with ndiswrapper. To get the driver visit your manufacturers website; for instance I have a HP laptop, therefore I go to HP.com and then to their drivers page. On the drivers page I look for the broadcom driver package for WIndows XP; it will be an .exe file. You will have to install cabextract to unpack the file. One of the files after unpacking will be bcmwl5.inf:

yum install cabextract

Your downloaded driver package will most likely be on the desktop:

cd Desktop

cabextract sp43654.exe

The .exe file will unzip and all the inner files will now be on the desktop. Proceed with the installation of NDISWrapper and then you can install the driver (bcmwl5.inf).

To download NDISWrapper you can visit:

http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=93482

You need gcc and the kernel headers to compile ndiswrapper:

yum install gcc kernel-devel-$(uname -r)

With these two packages, and associated dependencies NDISWrapper will install successfully.

Once your headers and compilation software are installed, navigate to the NDISwrapper folder and proceed to build:

cd Desktop

cd ndiswrapper-1.49

make

sudo make install

Then install the driver. Navigate to the desktop where you unzipped the .exe driver pack. Then proceed to install the new driver:

cd ~/Desktop

sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

Now you have to blacklist the bcm43xx driver to prevent conflict:

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

Add at the bottom of the file “blacklist bcm43xx”. Save and exit. Now add NDISWrapper to the modules list for autostart purposes:

sudo nano /etc/modules

Add on a new line “ndiswrapper”.

Done, finito, completo