Driver choice for addressing ubuntu wireless card issues

4

this should be a relatively simple question.

I'm attempting to get my windows wireless card to work with ubuntu, booted from my portable hard drive.

This is the guide I'm attempting to follow is on help.ubuntu.com, /community/WifiDocs/Driver/Ndiswrapper

My wireless card is a Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 AirForce One 54g 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller.

My computer is an HP Pavilion Entertainment dv5 notebook, which came with Vista 64.

I would like confirmation about which of the drivers I should use. At this point, I'm leaning towards Broadcom BCM4318 HP Pavilion zv6000, but I thought it best to ask advice before taking action.

The drivers I have to chose from are listed on this page http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/ndiswrapper/index.php?title=Category:Broadcom

Thanks!

Holly

user36614

Posted 2010-05-10T15:55:15.487

Reputation:

Answers

1

I think Broadcom proprietary drivers are available through the "Additional Drivers" thing in Administration. I'd just use this instead of trying to use something like NDIS (it's more stable I think).

My Broadcom driver is supported, so maybe yours will be too.

System->Administration->Additional Drivers

The open source drivers worked for me as well, so I would start with that if your wireless isn't working. wireless isn't too complicated, either it wiorks or it doesn't. It's not like you'll notice a significant difference between drivers in terms of speed.

beatgammit

Posted 2010-05-10T15:55:15.487

Reputation: 1 387

Remember, the simpler, supported solution is always better. You never know if a kernel update will break a non-supported driver, but a supported driver is a safe bet. – beatgammit – 2011-04-02T15:48:38.817

Yes. The b43 driver (built in to the kernel) will support this card. You will, however, need to obtain the firmware for this card separately (athough Broadcom freely licenses it, and it is tested and supported by Ubuntu developers, the card firmware is non-open-source and so it is not included in the kernel). Don't worry, in 11.04 you can do this easily from the Additional Drivers control panel or by running "sudo apt-get install firmware-b43-installer". – jcrawfordor – 2011-05-29T23:26:07.397

Asked: 2010-05-10T15:55:15.487

Viewed: 150 times

Active: 2011-08-03T13:01:37.667