The following info was gleaned from research for using the in built card under Ubuntu 7.10 but when a recent problem trashed Grub and I decided to bite the bullet and upgrade to the new 8.04 release. Well that was the plan but again its the alternate cd for 64 bit that was tried – in this case the RC (Release Candidate) version. Well – everything went swimmingly until the final stage when the install failed to install Grub – so I tried LILO and it failed too.
So when the final release came out I had to give Hardy Heron a go – and yes the Grub installation problem is fixed!!!
I also took the opportunity to clean up some test partitions and get a larger primary partition – but wireless seems to have disappeared. So back to the drawing board
Important – The information following relates to Ubuntu 7.10 – I’ll be back information regarding getting this wireless network card on 8.04
http://linuxwireless.org/en/users/Drivers/b43
http://gefiiri.googlepages.com/kubuntuinstallhp6715s gives a great breakdown of the steps. Below I’m giving some additional commentary explaining what the actuals steps represent.
echo ‘blacklist bcm43xx’ | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist -> this returns “Blacklist Bcm43xx”
sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9
will request the 64BIT alternate CD (since thats what I used to install the machine)
mkdir ~/bcm43xx; cd ~/bcm43xx
creates a folder and moves into it
sudo apt-get install cabextract
installs the cabextract program
wget ftp://ftp.hp.com/pub/softpaq/sp34001-34500/sp34152.exe
Downloads the required files from HP’s site
cabextract sp34152.exe
This extracts the contents of the file and message at end should say no errors.
The next range of steps relate to the configuration of NDISwrapper
NdisWrapper is a free software driver wrapper that enables the use of Microsoft Windows drivers for wireless network devices (cards, USB modems and routers), on Unix-like operating systems.
This is important, because many vendors of wireless cards do not release Linux supported drivers for the cards, nor information about how to write a driver. Ndiswrapper works by implementing the Windows kernel and NDIS APIs, and dynamically linking the driver to this implementation.
sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
ndiswrapper -l
sudo depmod -a
which creates dependencies for all modules listed in /etc/modules.conf.
sudo modprobe ndiswrapper
sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.orig
echo -e ‘auto loniface lo inet loopbackn’ | sudo tee /etc/network/interfaces
sudo ndiswrapper -mecho ‘ndiswrapper’ | sudo tee -a /etc/modules
echo ‘ENABLED=0’ | sudo tee -a /etc/default/wpasupplicant
Remove the Alternate CD from drive and then reboot machine.