How To: Wireless LAN with Broadcom BCM4312 in Fedora 11
Fedora 11 does have support for Broadcom wireless drivers, but it didn’t really work out on a friend’s laptop. Finally we got it working and I thought I’ll just note the steps down. Below are the three easy steps you need to take to make it work properly.
Step 1
Install needed packages
[root@fedora ~]$ yum install broadcom-wl wl-kmod
Step 2
Once the packages are installed successfully, reboot your laptop.
Step 3
Use the following command
[root@fedora ~]$ system-config-network
And add a new wireless device wlan0 or whatever you want by filling the required fields properly. If you want the device to be managed by NetworkManager, you can do so while editing the device you just added.
Activate the device. And you are on wifi 
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Have you tried the new open broadcom firmware that’s in Fedora 11? The package is b43-openfwwf
Peter,
No. I’ll give it a shot sometime. Thanks for the information
Step 0 is enable rpmfusion, because that’s where wl is. Because it’s non-free :/
I can see all wireless network around (including mine) but I still can’t connect. I’m using WPA1-PSK Personal. Every time I try to connect the Network Manager keeps asking my password. Well, I really know my password, so why I can’t connect?
Here my results, hope anyone can help me.
Fedora 11 64bits
lsmod | grep wl:
wl 1274884 0
lib80211 6356 2 lib80211_crypt_tkip,wl
rpm -qa | grep wl:
kmod-wl-2.6.29.6-217.2.8.fc11.x86_64-5.10.91.9-3.fc11.6.x86_64
iwl5000-firmware-8.24.2.12-1.fc11.noarch
broadcom-wl-5.10.91.9-1.fc11.noarch
iwl3945-firmware-15.32.2.9-1.fc11.noarch
kmod-wl-5.10.91.9-3.fc11.6.x86_64
iwl4965-firmware-228.61.2.24-1.fc11.noarch
excellent – worked perfectly.. fedora 11 on DELL 1545 which has the
[sidwilroy@SidFedora11 ~]$ lspci | grep Broad
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)
[
iwconfig - works and lists eth1
driver shows up..
[root@SidFedora11 sidwilroy]# lsmod| grep wl
wl 1269288 0
lib80211 5064 2 lib80211_crypt_tkip,wl
I didn’t have to install any windows drivers with wrappers – nanda..
Thanks a ton for you post!!! You rock!
Managed to get this working! In my router, just changed the protocol from TKIP to TKIP/AES… seems like Fedora prefers the second one…
Worked for me! Thanks!
$ uname -r
2.6.30.5-43.fc11.x86_64
Hi Kulbir,
How can I execute this command yum install broadcom-wl wl-kmod without an internet connection? Is there any workaround?
Thanks.
Great! Worked like a charm! I was near to frustration with my new Acer Aspire One D250. Thanks a lot
Hey Kulbir,
Can you help me out with getting wireless work on 2.6.30.9-102.fc11.i686.PAE kernel? I have Broadcom 4312 card. It worked for the previous kernel and when i had “yum -y update”, kernel got updated and so did kmod-wl. Now, it doesn’t detect wireless
rpm -qa |grep wl gives the following:
akmod-wl-5.10.91.9-4.fc11.2.i686
iwl3945-firmware-15.32.2.9-1.fc11.noarch
iwl4965-firmware-228.61.2.24-1.fc11.noarch
broadcom-wl-5.10.91.9-1.fc11.noarch
kmod-wl-2.6.30.9-102.fc11.i686.PAE-5.10.91.9-4.fc11.7.i686
iwl5000-firmware-8.24.2.12-1.fc11.noarch
kmod-wl-PAE-5.10.91.9-4.fc11.7.i686
Plz help
Thanks,
Chaitanya
Hi kulbir
i tried using the way u explained
but my wirless driver is still not coming in my devices
in my lap broadcom 802.11g is attached as an internal driver
please suggest what to do
it’s urgent
r
Well this page gave me the pointer I needed to get it working. Though I had problems with rpm fusion. However the rpmfusion kmod-wl-PAE package however wanted to install a FC13 package for a fc14 kernel on my fc12 system. Needless to say it could not find any such kernel, so dependancies failed.
Eventually I found a RPM for my kernel using a google search for kmod-wl-
with the current kernel (uname -r) and once installed and rebooted my wireless came up fine.
Tonight I will try to install the akmod-wl package so that the kernel driver will automatically build and install the appropriat modulae when my kernel is next upgraded.
Question: How do you find out the exact BCM chip that is being used?
My laptop parts list only gave “Dell Wireless 1520 802.11n Half mini card”