# Broadcom BCM4306?

## The_Great_Sephiroth

I have a BCM4306 in an old HP laptop. I compiled the driver into my kernel along with the firmware. Using lspci I can see the device and I see that it is using the "b43-pci-bridge" module. No firmware errors (or anything relating to Broadcom/BCM) in my logs. However, rfkill does not see it, "ifconfig -a" does not list it, and Network Manager in KDE does not show wireless at all. So what is going wrong here? No errors, it is seen on the PCI bus, it has the correct driver loaded (the install CD also lists it as using "b43-pci-bridge"), but it is invisible to all the programs?

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## eccerr0r

I would think you'd need the b43 or b43-legacy (I don't know what the bcm 4306 is, sorry) driver.

I personally am starting to hate the broadcom wifi... yuck...

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## charles17

 *The_Great_Sephiroth wrote:*   

> I have a BCM4306 in an old HP laptop. I compiled the driver into my kernel along with the firmware.

 You might get some information in dmesg grepping for that devices bus id. *Quote:*   

> $ dmesg | grep -i 08:00.0

 

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## The_Great_Sephiroth

I figured it out, I believe. There are two BCM4306 chips. Rev02 is legacy, but Rev03 is not. I had used legacy due to everything on the 4306 stating legacy. Now my only hurdle is numerous recompiles to keep adding firmware to my kernel. So far we have four firmware blobs because each time I add one it requests another upon booting said kernel. Broadcom sucks. One reason i refuse to buy HP products. Well, one of MANY reasons.

Anyway I will post the solution and all required firmware for future readers if this build works.

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## The_Great_Sephiroth

I wanted to update you. I now have it working, but I cannot associate with my router. It associates and then instantly deauthenticates with reason 3. KWallet in KDE keeps prompting me for the wireless password, which is correct. Other devices CAN connect on the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands. Only this machine cannot.

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## The_Great_Sephiroth

Alright, I can only find an error about 802-1x not being initialized in the xsession-errors log. Nothing else. It says something along the lines of "ConnectionDbus::fromDbusMap: setting 802-1x not ninitialized". This comes from kcmshell and kded. What is going on with Dbus which would cause this? I've never experienced this with any of my other systems, and the only real difference is that they are 64bit and this is i686.

*UPDATE*

Searching said log for "kded" produces hundreds of that error. 4032, kded, 802-1x not initialized. I just created this account an hour ago. Something is broken.

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## The_Great_Sephiroth

Anybody? I am stuck here.

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## The_Great_Sephiroth

I rebuilt network manager and udev. Now I am seeing why I am losing connection. I am getting an error that association took too long. How can I fix that? I thought association was handled by the hardware and I could not affect it?

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## eccerr0r

I don't have any b43 wifis near me, I just recall the hell of a time trying to deal with a remote hp laptop with a b43 wifi.  This thing would not behave on the wifi network that it was supposed to be on.  Remote debug that wifi was annoying, as the problem is that it was DoS'ing whatever AP it was connected to.  The workaround solution was: get a USB wifi adaptor.  The machiine worked much better with that plugged in, and was able to get a little further but ultimately also stuck wondering why the B43 sucks so much...

You should test if it works without WEP/WPA, see if at least it will associate without security.  Then see if you can get WPA to work.  I recall a long time ago trying to get my eeePC's wifi working, WPA2-enterprise would simply not work... on the first attempt.  It would timeout and not work.  The next attempt it would connect.

However a new NM / wifi driver / wpa_supplicant is out, and it will connect on the first try... *shrug*  very weird.

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## The_Great_Sephiroth

I may swap the NIC for an Atheros 5xxx I have had laying around for ages. Getting tired of issues with sorry Broadcom. Worst wireless NICs EVER!

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