To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Broadcom wireless does actually work, without any need for ndiswrapper and using only the Mandriva GUI tools. This is the best we can do, though - we can't make it work out-of-the-box as it requires firmware, and we cannot legally distribute the firmware even in the non-free editions.
So we made the Mandriva network configuration tools wrap bcm43xx-fwcutter, the tool that extracts the firmware from the Windows driver. If you remove your ndiswrapper configuration and run the Mandriva network configuration tool, it should tell you about this and ask for a Windows driver to extract the firmware from. If you have one, try it. If you don't have one, or the Windows driver you have doesn't work for firmware extraction (some don't), use the one at http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware - the 3.xx one, not the 4.xx. That should be all you need to do (except the usual configuration for any network adapter). I tested this myself, as I have a Broadcom wireless chip on my own machine, and I've walked a couple of people through it since release. It's also mentioned in the release notes - http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandriva/2008.0/Notes#Required...




Member since:
2007-10-10
Downloaded the KDE One cd yesterday, and by my suprice almost everything worked on my laptop by default.
Powersaved and so on...
The only thing that didn't work was my broadcom wireless, but this card is really bad in linux, but with ndiswrapper that was up and running as well.
Just bought the Powerpack version, doesn't cost that much and are installing as we speak, just to support the guys at Mandriva.
Good work...and it looks really nice, a nice release.
Have been using Ubuntu since the first release but I think it is rather buggy, at least on my hardware.
Edited 2007-10-10 17:11