No Proprietary Drivers with a custom kernel

I had to RMA my AAO due to wireless problems. When it was returned, the Atheros WiFi card had been replaced with a Broadcom 4311. With a stock Ubuntu install, wireless works just fine after activating the proprietary driver using the standard Ubuntu Hardware Driver manager. (The driver is listed as "Broadcom STA Wireless Driver")

When I try to use any of the customized kernels from the forum, or use the .config files to compile my own, I no longer have wireless. That wasn't a surprise, as I expected that a kernel for the standard AAO wouldn't have the driver for my oddball hardware. But using a custom kernel also seems to break the Hardware Driver manager - it doesn't list any proprietary drivers available.

Can anyone point me in the right direction - either getting the Hardware Driver manager working, or getting my wireless working without it? Thanks.

 

Does using the proprietary driver mean using a Windows driver with ndiswrapper? If so, ndiswrapper (a kernel module, so it needs kernel-headers to be installed for a successful build) must be rebuilt and installed for each kernel version. You also need to use the latest ndiswrapper from the git repo, the standard 1.5.3 release won't compile with the most recent kernels.

You may also try to see if the b43 or the b43legacy drivers were built with your kernel--they may work with your card.

 

No, it doesn't use ndiswrapper. As I understand it, it's a "binary blob" driver available from Broadcom.

I did try compiling my own kernel with the B43 and B43Legacy drivers included, but still no wireless, and nothing listed in "Hardware Drivers" either. Now that I'm thinking about it, though, I seem to remember reading somewhere that, in order to use the B43 drivers, you have to extract the firmware from the windows driver. I may be confusing that with something else, though - I've read a lot of stuff on this, and it seems that the procedure for getting Broadcom cards to work has changed a lot over the last couple of years. I've seen docs referring to the B43 and B43Legacy, ndiswrapper, firmware cutters, and Broadcom's own proprietary driver.

 

I've installed ubuntu on another computer with the Broadcom card, but most howto aren't up to date it seems. It isn't my computer so I just gave up for the moment.

 

If it's a Broadcom proprietary Linux kernel driver, it probably works only with a specific Linux kernel version, as (kernel) developers like to break ABI/API whenever they want...

 

Look at this http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Broadcom_43xx . I'm assuming you are comfortable compiling your own kernel. the lib/firmware directory may be different in ubuntu. Hope this helps. (i tend to search gentoo for any kernel related stuff as i am a former ricer and love their documentation).

 

Oh, Broadcom's hybrid driver--I think that generates a wl.ko file for the driver. That said, it still needs to be recompiled for each kernel update. That's true for any native Linux driver.

For newer distro's, that Gentoo wiki's a bit out of date--bcm43xx has been replaced by b43 and b43legacy.