# b43-fwcutter

## sall

I am trying to get my bcm4318 card to work in my laptop. I have installed the package net-wireless/b43-fwcutter by:

emerge net-wireless/b43fwcutter

Everything goes well. However I have no idea where to go from here I ran an etc-update and rebooted. No wireless card. Can anyone help me out I want to get my wireless up before I continue building the rest of system so I have free range and don't have to sit in one spot. Thanks in advance.

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## d2_racing

Hi, can you post your lspci plz ?

Because a B43 is pretty hard to make this thing works on Linux : http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#supported

I hate broadcom for that.

After a fresh reboot can you post this :

```

# ifconfig -a

# iwconfig

# dmesg | grep -i b43

```

If you don't see anything, then double check your kernel to see if you have enabled the b43 driver. 

Also you may  need to install the firmware like this :

I don't know if this thing is necessary nowadays :

```

# export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"

# wget http://mirror2.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.3.tar.bz2

# tar xjf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.3.tar.bz2

# cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver

# mkdir /lib/firmware

# b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware <firmware file>

```

Last edited by d2_racing on Fri Jan 23, 2009 5:58 pm; edited 1 time in total

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## lucapost

you can read http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Broadcom_43xx.

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## krenshala

 *lucapost wrote:*   

> you can read http://en.gentoo-wiki.com/wiki/Broadcom_43xx.

 

I just recently got a BCM4318 working using information from the forums here and a couple other sites.  The only real problem I ran into was that b43-fwcutter didn't like the latest driver version from Belkin when it tried to extract the firmware.  I didn't do the kernel patching listed in the above link, so I don't know if that would have helped or not.

Otherwise it was actually surprisingly straight forward, considering the complaints I've read about how much of a pain it can be.

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