This HOW TO describes enabling support for WiFi devices based on Broadcom 4311/4312/4313/4321/4322/43224/43225 chipsets - using Broadcom's hybrid device driver - on Debian systems. This tutorial was prepared shortly after the release of LMDE 201009 and draws heavily on
THIS Debian Wiki page.
Support of these chipsets is possible using a driver (wl) made available by the vendor, which includes a binary-only component targeted for the x86 or x86-64 architecture. All supported devices are listed at the end of this page. This is a "non-free" driver.
The BCM4313, BCM43224 and BCM43225 chipsets are alternatively supported by the brcm80211 driver.
And as of 9 Sept 2010 Broadcom announced the initial release of a fully-open Linux driver for it's latest generation of 11n chipsets. The driver, while still a work in progress... supports multiple current chips (BCM4313, BCM43224, BCM43225) as well as providing a framework for supporting additional chips in the future
NOTE: (2011/2/23) The following has been observed specifically for the BCM4313 chipset (Device ID 14E4:4727) but may apply to other chipsets which were updated from providing 802.11b/g to 802.11b/g/n support. The b/g version of BCM 4313 has been supported since version 5.60.48.36 of the driver, currently available in the Debian testing non-free repositories. Support for the b/g/n revision of BCM 4313 requires use of driver version 5.100.82.38 or newer, which is not currently available in the repositories. You will need to use installation method 3, see below.
NOTE 2: (2011/3/6) Version 5.100.82.38-1 of Broadcom-STA is now available in the LMDE repositories. Installation method 1 should work for newer wifi cards.
INSTALLATION:
1. The Mint developers of LMDE have enabled the "non-free" repositories by default. To confirm this navigate to
Menu > Administration > Software Sources.
Select the tab
Debian Testing Officially supported DFSG-compatible Software with Non-free Dependencies Non-DFSG-compatible Software should be present and selected, select it if not currently enabled.
If the "non-free" repository was not present, add it to to /etc/apt/sources.list Open the file with
gksudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.list
and add these lines at the end of the file
# Debian Testing (currently Wheezy)
deb http://ftp.us.debian.org/debian testing main contrib non-free
save and close.
Updated to reflect testing repositories instead of Squeeze repositories.
2. The remainder of the installation process will be performed as the root user in a terminal. Open a terminal, type su, press , type your password (there will be no response from the blinking cursor), press . The terminal prompt will change from something like username@computer-name ~ $ to computer-name username # Note: the change from $ to #. Also, to avoid confusion between a one (1) and lowercase L (l) commands can be copied from the tutorial and pasted into the terminal. The key combination to paste into the terminal is
3. Update the list of available packages. Install the module-assistant and wireless-tools packages:
apt-get update
apt-get install module-assistant wireless-tools
4. Build and install a broadcom-sta-modules-* package for your system, using Module-Assistant:
m-a a-i broadcom-sta
The "a-i" stands for "auto-install," meaning "download the module source, compile it for the current kernel and install it".
5. Blacklist the brcm80211 module, to prevent it conflicting for support of BCM4313, BCM43224 and BCM43225 devices:
echo blacklist brcm80211 >> /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf
6. Rebuild your initial ramdisk, to blacklist modules defined at /etc/modprobe.d/broadcom-sta-common.conf within initramfs:
update-initramfs -u -k $(uname -r)
7. Unload conflicting modules:
modprobe -r b44 b43 b43legacy ssb brcm80211
8. Load the wl module:
modprobe wl
9. Verify your device has an available interface:
iwconfig
10.
Configure your wireless interface as appropriate.
11. Exit the root terminal:
exit
