Have you tried ndiswrapper? -----Original Message----- From: David [mailto:spotslayer@rgv.rr.com] Sent: Wednesday, October 12, 2005 3:04 PM To: Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas Cc: suse-amd64@suse.com Subject: Re: [suse-amd64] Broadcom I hear you Gus. This is the same thing I uncovered when I did the original 9.2 x64 on this computer. The linuxant works real good. I have been able to plug a netgear pcmcia wireless card and use it to run kismet. I just needed to set the netgear card to run in the adhoc mode. This was a better way anyway as I could still surf the net via the built in and have kismet monitoring at the same time. David Constantine 'Gus' Fantanas wrote:

David wrote:

...

I would like to upgrade from 9.2 to 10.0. With the 9.2 I had to purchase driverloader from linuxant. Does anyone know if Novell and 10.0 has a 64bit driver for the built in broadcom BCM4306/BCM2050 builtin wireless adapter? I have a HP pavillion laptop with a AMD64 Athlon. David

I have a Compaq Presario AMD64-based laptop, which is the twin brother

of the HP Pavillion (albeit usually a bit less expensive). It, too, has the Broadcom wifi chipset. From what I understand, Broadcom has given the open-source community the middle finger, so I don't see how SuSE --or any other distribution-- can have drivers for their wifi chipset. (I bought this laptop because it has an nVidia graphics card and nVidia is thought to have excellent Linux support.)

In its infinite wisdom, HP has done something else with these laptops,

at least the Compaq 3000-series and Pavillion 5000-series, both nVidia

based: they programmed the BIOS so that it accepts only the peripherals HP wants! As I read in the pertinent boards, a few people tried to install another micro-PCI wifi device with native Llinux support (taking the laptop apart), but the BIOS rejected it. I vaguely remember a link to the HP site discussing this matter; HP claimed they did it to satisfy FCC regulations because, unlike a cardbus/PCMCIA wifi card, which is sold as a self-contained system, the micro-PCI device needs to be FCC-certified with the laptop's built-in antenna, or some similar weak excuse (it has been some time since I read this). No word on why the BIOS does the same thing with hard disk drives.

Linuxant made the installation of their drivers very easy (I, too, use

Linuxant on this and another laptop). When you upgrade to 10.0, make sure you also install the kernel sources. Then, as usual, run the Linuxant installation script (making sure you are connected to the internet and, if you are running as a normal user, you have run 'xhost

+local:localhost' because Linuxant's installer runs under root and needs graphics, otherwise it reverts to command-line mode), and follow

the prompts. You should *NOT* need another license from Linuxant because the license should follow the wifi device, not the kernel.

Linuxant's 64-bit driverloader has worked very well for me. Unfortunately, it uses the Windows drivers (as it is supposed to), which do not have everything kismet wants to see.

CF

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