DSL Position on Broadcom Adapters

Forum: Networking
Topic: DSL Position on Broadcom Adapters
started by: Juanito

Posted by Juanito on July 24 2006,11:25

Is it possible to get an official position on Broadcom network adapters from DSL - i.e. are they supposed to be supported "out of the box" or will some kind of "fix" be required for the forseeable future?

The reason I ask is that Broadcom adapters seem to be very common (at least in Dell laptops) so why not support them.

My Dell Latitude D400 has a Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5705M Gigabit Ethernet adapter which worked out of the box with DSL 2.0 but now, apparently, does not work with DSL 3.0.1 so I suppose I will have to mess around with bcm5700.dsl to get things going (which files are you supposed to backup again?).

I also had a Broadcom Corporation BCM94306 802.11g (aka Dell wireless 1350) wireless adapter which required a bunch of "hoop jumping" with ndiswrapper to get it going. Since it croaked and I now have a Dell wireless 1450 adapter, I guess I have a bunch more hoop jumping with DSL 3.0/ndiswrapper to look forward to.

DSL is really excellent but the Broadcom network card story is really painful.

Posted by Juanito on July 26 2006,05:49

'Seems I spoke too soon about the Broadcom NetXtreme BCM5705M Gigabit Ethernet (rev 01) not working with DSL 3.0.1 - I first tried it at the office which seems to block network connections from unknown users. At home everything worked fine with DSL automatically using the tg3 module.

The Broadcom BCM4309 802.11a/b/g (rev 03) aka Dell Wireless 1450 doesn't seem to want to work with ndiswrapper however...

Posted by ron on July 28 2006,22:34

Quote (Juanito @ July 26 2006,01:49)

Quote

The Broadcom BCM4309 802.11a/b/g (rev 03) aka Dell Wireless 1450 doesn't seem to want to work with ndiswrapper however...

Right. Those chipsets DON'T work with any Linux including DSL. The DSL Wiki should be amended accordingly, to exclude:

Atheros 802.11b/g (IBM OEM Mini PCI in T41,42)
Avaya Wireless Silver Card 802.11b PCMCIA (Orinoco Silver)
Cisco Aironet 350

and I don't know what others, because these would definitely not work "out of the box" as advertised. They would be recognised but would not function. Ndiswrapper wouldn't make any difference. It doesn't matter what label's on the device, the chipsets 802.11a/b are not supported.