I recently inherited a HP ZV6000 laptop, I decided to install Linux on this and began by trying to install Fedora 5. Everything went smoothly, I booted into Linux to find that my WiFi was not working. A little research on the net pointed to the Broadcom 4306 WiFi card that comes with my laptop to be the culprit. Frustrated users of Broadcom abound in various online forums and are fed up with this crappy card.
I tried both NDISwrapper and the FWcutter method but to no avail. I must have been doing something wrong because on most forums people were able to get the card working pretty easily. A few unfortunate souls like me ran into trouble and couldn't get it to work. I decided I might as well try a different distro so I downloaded Ubuntu linux and installed it, again the WiFi card was not working. I messed around with Ubuntu by following the instructions given on the Ubuntu forums and got the card working but it is very sporadic.
I gave up for a few days and when Fedora Core 6 was released I decided to give it a shot again. I downloaded and installed FC6 but the card still refuses to work. I read on the fedora forum that the WiFi card is PCI-X and needs different drivers. I will try mucking about and see if I can get it working. meanwhile for the unfortunate people who have Broadcom just like me and want to try it themselves here are the links.
Getting Broadcom to work on UBUNTU with NDISwrapper.
Another forum posting for UBUNTU & NDISwrapper.
Fedora Forum search results for Braodcom+4306.
I understand that the Broadcom corporation wants to protect its intellectual property and will not release the source code for the drivers. A few braves souls have reverse-engineered the driver and got the driver built into the Linux kernel from 2.17 onwards. Big companies like HP who bundle such crappy cards should come to the rescue, if they really care about Linux why not release a driver compatible with Linux that works out of the box without us resorting to various serpentine methods? at the very least the should fund the group that is reverse engineering the drivers.
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