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having trouble getting my broadcom wifi card set up. i do not have a wired connection and am trying to install the drivers/ firmware via fwcutter manually. commandline newby .. any help much appreciated. thanks

There is the guide here and Iagagnon found this - both have no-alternative-Internet-access solutions.

If it's a specific problem be sure to post with the details. Good luck.

rich_roast wrote:There is the guide here and Iagagnon found this - both have no-alternative-Internet-access solutions.

If it's a specific problem be sure to post with the details. Good luck.

Much Thanks. just what i was looking for. the first page had a solution that worked for me, never tried the other.

the difficulty i have found generally as a new terminal user is that often the command line instructions - while good - assume some base knowledge which i do not have. in this case, the solution worked perfect, but didn't say much about where and how to do some of the basics. as you see in #3 below, it just says, "Execute the following necessary commands on the files above manually." for a user like me, i don't know what that is. (i will fill in some of what i did ..)


No Alternate Internet Access

If you don't have any other means of internet access on your computer, you will have to:

1.

Install b43-fwcutter (without the firmware downloading and being set up) which should be located on the Ubuntu 9.04 install disc (add it as a repository in Synaptic) or from /var/cache/apt/archives on an Ubuntu computer with b43 installed.
2. Obtain
*

http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl ... 130.20.0.o and
*

http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/br ... .0.tar.bz2.
3. Execute the following necessary commands on the files above manually

** this mean put the two above files in your /lib/firmware folder, which i was able to do in mint8 by opening the folder as root in the gui- i have not figured out yet how to do this all from a command line. so being able to open folders as root in the gui is a nice feature for users like me who are learning bits of terminal code as i go .. it is little things like this that have always blocked me in the past.

Secondly, before running the commands below from terminal, i found the need to move into that directory by the cd change directory - in the terminal
sudo cd /lib/firmware

now you can run the rest. i got to all this with trial and error and luck as a terminal newby**

sudo b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
tar xfvj broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2
sudo b43-fwcutter --unsupported -w /lib/firmware broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod/wl_apsta_mimo.o

Try restarting your computer to verify the installation went correctly.

If it fails to work after a restart try 'sudo modprobe b43'. Then add the line 'b43' to 'sudo gedit /etc/modules'.

I think it's important to point out that what the original document author meant by the third set of instructions was simply "run these commands verbatim in terminal"; admittedly it would have been clearer to have stated this explicitly. This is an explanation of what each command does, one by one:
Runs the b43 firmware extractor with root privileges, telling it to put the firmware in /lib/firmware, from the wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o driver in the present working directory.
Runs tar, an archiving utility, telling it to extract from the file broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2 in the present working directory, verbosely listing all the files it extracts, and filtering the archive through bzip2 (another archiving utility with a better compression ratio) (that's the j switch, btw). Since no target is specified, the archive is extracted, retaining the file hierarchy in the archive, into the present working directory. It doesn't really matter where, and optionally the archive and the extracted files could be trashed after the next job's done.
Again, runs the b43-fwcutter program with root privileges, telling it to put the unsupported (i.e. Windows (?)) firmware in /lib/firmware/, extracting from the wl_apsta_mimo.o file found in the kmod directory of the broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.

Which should get your firmware sorted without need for nautilus. Also, you don't need to be root to change present working directory to /lib/firmware, normal users can read that directory, just not write to it.

Your method works fine, since all the b43-fwcutter specify the target path explicitly, so nothing's really changed except the path you were working from.

If you're new to working with terminal stick with it, the shell if fantastically powerful and over time you'll get accustomed to it. I'm pretty sure that someone on these forums put up a (longish) list of commands with short explanations but I can't seem to find it, otherwise there's a bunch of useful links on this post. You can also hit tab twice in a row in terminal to have it show you all two thousand + possibilities, but I wouldn't necessarily advise that My approach has always been to check the man page for whatever command it is if I'm not sure about what it does:
would bring up foo's man(ual) page, if foo existed. Some find man pages too dry and condensed but they're good as a reference. See this useful post.

I have Acer D250 and have this hardware. I havn't any wire internet and CD/DVD-ROM. But I have 8Gb USB stick. I installed iso to USBstick through unetbootin-windows-377 and it work fine, but now I need somehow integrate this drivers to distrib in windows system. How?

VitAl2013 wrote:I have Acer D250 and have this hardware. I havn't any wire internet and CD/DVD-ROM. But I have 8Gb USB stick. I installed iso to USBstick through unetbootin-windows-377 and it work fine, but now I need somehow integrate this drivers to distrib in windows system. How?

If I understand what you're asking correctly, you can just download the two files mentioned in the howto linked to above that we've been talking about and transfer them to your usb stick alongside the Mint installation files. Don't worry about this, it won't break Mint. Once you're in Mint you can just transfer them to your home folder and proceed with the howto instructions normally. I would test this in the live environment first to make sure it works, and if provided it does, install definitively. A final, conservative approach is to dual boot between Windows and Mint; that way you can always boot into Windows to fetch the files and then transfer them to your /home directory. Hope that helps.

1st step of how-to it's install "b43-fwcutter" Where I can download it? And how I can install it? All that I catch that all do it thru net (sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter) but I havn't assces to net until I install drivers.

rich_roast wrote:would bring up foo's man(ual) page, if foo existed. Some find man pages too dry and condensed but they're good as a reference. See this useful post.

hey. thanks for the detailed response .. very helpful, and the link page too.
the trouble i had was not knowing if the two files would unpackage to the proper place in the filesystem. in the past i have downloaded and unzipped packages right on the desktop - and there they sat, unusable .. so this time i put them in the folder (i guessed they needed to be). then when i ran the commands i got an error msg saying it couldn't find the files, hence the cd away from the desktop. i'm starting to get bits figured out. thanks again for your explanations.

VitAl2013 wrote:1st step of how-to it's install "b43-fwcutter" Where I can download it? And how I can install it? All that I catch that all do it thru net (sudo apt-get install b43-fwcutter) but I havn't assces to net until I install drivers.

As far as I can tell it should be on your install media:

WifiDocs wrote:Install b43-fwcutter (without the firmware downloading and being set up) which should be located on the Ubuntu 9.04 install disc (add it as a repository in Synaptic) or from /var/cache/apt/archives on an Ubuntu computer with b43 installed.

Since Mint is built on Ubuntu it should be a matter of pointing Synaptic towards your usb stick; I'm not too hot on the details of setting local media as a repository, this would be easier if you had a CD as your install media as I gather it would then be a matter of Administration -> Software Sources, second tab and Add CD button.

Failing that, as far as I can tell the firmware extractor doesn't have any dependencies to resolve on a default Mint, so you could just grab the debian package from Karmic repositories by following this link, being sure to pick between 64 and 32 bit correctly. Put the .deb file on your stick and when you're next in Mint double click on its icon to begin installation; gDebi, a gui debian package installer, should be available by default and will take care of the rest. It should then be possible to continue using the guide. Best of luck.