istallazione della scheda wireless BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g]

hp pavilion di mio fratello ha una scheda wireless BCM4318 integrata sulla motherbord, il driver open source funziona molto male quindi ho provato ad utilizzare il driver di windows

passo 1 identificare la scheda:
chris-notebook:/home/chris86 # lspci
06:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)
passo 2 scaricare il driver windows
al seguente link http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/joomla/index.php?/component/option,com_openwiki/Itemid,33/id,list_b/ trovo il driver adatto per far funzionare la scheda wifi; utilizzando la funzione trova di firefox e cercando per 06:02.0 (stringa numerica ID della scheda)
il driver può essere caricato direttamente al seguente link:
ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp30001-30500/SP30379.exe

passo 3 installazione
scompatto il driver.exe con winrar (funziona benissimo con wine) e poi da root digito
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf #installa
ndiswrapper -l #controlla se è andato tutto bene
se si ha la seguente risposta tutto è andato bene:
bcmwl5 : driver installed
device (14E4:4318) present (alternate driver: ssb)
poi modprobe ndiswrapper

passo 4 configurazione con yast
apro yast dispositivi di rete > impostazioni di rete e seguo questo piccolo how to

In the Network Card Configuration Overview, click on "Add".

In the Manual Network Card Configuration, select "wireless" from the dropdown menu, leave everything else default and type in ndiswrapper in the module name box. Click on "Next".

On the Network Address Setup, goto the general tab, and set the Firewall to "External Zone". This may need some experimentation. Set Device Activation to Boot time (or Hot Plug). Click on "Next".

On the next screen configure the settings for your network. I've found it's best to leave the ESSID and encryption key fields empty and to let KDEWallet configure this, otherwise there may be conflicts. Most of the time, your Operating Mode will be set to "Managed". Again, you may need to experiment a bit.

In this context, I would like to share my experience of making the Broadcom Dell 1390 mini-pci wireless card work in a Comapq Presario V6000 laptop after I had installed OpenSuSE 10.2 (64 bit) in a dual boot configuration with Windows Vista Home (32 bit). Hopefully, this will save you some time and a lot of frustration, if you are on a similar track.

The laptop was connecting fine to the internet under Windows Vista through a Linksys wireless router with WPA-PSK security and it was set not to broadcast the network's ESSID. My objective was to achieve the same functionality under OpenSuSE 10.2. The first problem was to get the wirelss card recognized. I had to use ndiswrapper with bcmwl5.inf and bcmwl564.sys (available as the self-extracting R151517.EXE file from the Dell download centre) driver files for that. No other method worked. Then I tried to configured the card using YaST as described above. Although the blue light was now on, and the card could detect other visible secure networks when I used ' iwlist wlan0 scan ' it did not see my network (this was understandable as the ESSID was not broadcast). I could neither configure the security settings using YaST. The iwconfig command always reported the default settings only. It was such a frustration! Then I used the KDE KNetworkManager utility and the problem was solved. I could configure the wireless card for my secure network and connect to the internet - it was a doodle. The only thing is that you need to fire up knetworkmanager every time you boot up, so need to put it in your shell's profile file.

passo 4 caricare il modulo al boot

ritengo che questo passaggio è fondamentale perché inizialmente non avevo apportato la modifica e la scheda non funzionava :

sono andato ad editare il file /etc/sysconfig/kernel sostituendo la riga MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT="" con MODULES_LOADED_ON_BOOT="ndiswrapper"

poi ho riavviato e il simpatico leed della scheda wireless si è acceso ed il device ha funzionato a dovere