At the time of this writing, many laptops, including Dell and HP/Compaq, contain Wifi cards made by Broadcom. In the past, there has been no ‘official’ driver written by Broadcom for these devices for Linux. A tried and true way of using these cards with Linux is through the use of the NDISwrapper utility.
General Procedure
- Install NDISwrapper package if not already installed.
- Download the Wifi drivers from Dell, Compaq, etc.
- Extract the necessary files (e.g. bcmwl5.inf & bcmwl.sys). This may require running a “self-extracting” file under Wine.
- Install the driver: sudo ndiswrapper -i /dir_path/bcmwl5.inf
- Verify the hardware is present: sudo ndiswrapper -l
- Load the driver: sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
- Update the configuration: sudo ndiswrapper -m
Related Links
- NDISwrapper homepage: http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net/
- NDISwrapper manpage: http://linux.die.net/man/8/ndiswrapper
- Another copy of these instructions: https://www.scientificlinux.org/documentation/howto/ndiswrapper.broadcom
