Ideas When Broadcom Wireless Easy Install Will Be Available?

[Tjabo]

I installed LMDE today, and it looks really nice, but it will need to have the normal Broadcom WiFi easy driver installer like the other Mints before it will really be a viable option for me and most of my family.

Mint 10 RC looks like a home run for the moment, surpassing my previous favorite, Mint 8 32 bit!

[dawgdoc]

so far I have seen no time-line for adding the Hardware Driver application to LMDE.

If you are needing the Broadcom-sta (wl) driver, check THIS tutorial. It will involve using the terminal.

[Tjabo]

Thank you!

I had skimmed that earlier, and I may well give it a shot for myself, especially so I can contribute to the project at the very least as a beta tester or whatever.

At this point though, Mint is so fantastically user friendly that most of my family is using it. There is great interest in migrating to the Debian version, but it will need to become similarly user friendly before many of the 7 or 8 computers I'm personally aware of will switch to it from the standard versions of Mint.

I'm looking forward to it!

[Tjabo]

Looks like the laptop I've put this LMDE on has a WiFi card numbered 14e4:1673 in it. If that is true (and I haven't messed something up), that card is not supported yet, true?

Thanks in advance as always!

[Tjabo]

Hmmmm. . . . Mint 10 RC doesn't seem to recognize this WiFi card either. . . I think at this rate I'll probably just end up setting this laptop aside unless I can find some windows driver to use for the WiFi card or something. Time for a bit of digging I guess.

[dawgdoc]

I think the device you listed, 14e4:1673, is your Ethernet card.

vendor: 14e4 ("Broadcom Corporation"), device: 1673 ("NetXtreme BCM5755M Gigabit Ethernet PCI Express")

From THIS Broadcom site:

Table 1: Broadcom Ethernet Controller Device ID
Device ID Part # Model
1673 BCM5755M NetXtreme Desktop/Mobile

If anyone ever needs it a link to the driver for the BCM5755M is HERE

If you run this command in a terminal it should tell you both your wired and wireless devices.

Code: Select all

inxi -N

[Tjabo]

Oh crap, thanks! ! ! I'll check it!

EDIT: You're right, but that seems to be all of the networking cards that are coming up. . . I'm beginning to think this laptop has been stripped of it's WiFi card. Just figures if that's the case based on where it came from...

[malligt]

From what I've read, the (formerly) proprietary Broadcom wireless drivers are supposed to be included with the 2.6.37 kernel

[Tjabo]

Thank you, that would be excellent!

I'm planning to install LMDE on my other laptop (dell D600) with a known wireless card to give it the proper test I intended to with this other laptop. Also I'm planning to run it on my desktop since it ran so well from the ethernet cable.

I'm loving the LMDE! Of course, I'm also loving the Mint 10 RC....

[dawgdoc]

From what I've read, the (formerly) proprietary Broadcom wireless drivers are supposed to be included with the 2.6.37 kernel

I recall that Broadcom was releasing drivers as open source. The release I saw referenced wireless N drivers, it did not seem to include older drivers specific for the wireless G devices.

[malligt]

From the web:
Henry Ptasinski of Broadcom further wrote on a mailing list: “The driver, while still a work in progress, is released as full source and uses the native mac80211 stack. It supports multiple current chips (BCM4313, BCM43224, BCM43225) as well as providing a framework for supporting additional chips in the future, including mac80211-aware embedded chips.”

The Broadcom support page states: These packages contain Broadcom's IEEE 802.11a/b/g/n hybrid Linux device driver for use with Broadcom's BCM4311-, BCM4312-, BCM4313-, BCM4321-, and BCM4322-based hardware. There are different tars for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 CPU architectures. Make sure that you download the appropriate tar because the hybrid binary file must be of the appropriate architecture type. The hybrid binary file is agnostic to the specific version of the Linux kernel because it is designed to perform all interactions with the operating system through operating-system-specific files and an operating system abstraction layer file. All Linux operating-system-specific code is provided in source form, making it possible to retarget to different kernel versions and fix operating system related issues.

[dawgdoc]

That's better news than I had originally seen, thanks malligt!