// Fedora 15 on a HP Compaq 615 laptop: WLAN

The HPC 615 was very popular because of its attractive cost-performance ratio.1) I just installed Fedora 15 Lovelock on a HPC 615 with AMD Athlon X2, 320GiB HDD, ATI Radeon HD3200 and 4GiB RAM. Everything works out-of-the-box with one exception: Wireless LAN. There was no firmware for the Broadcom BCM4312 WLAN chip. However. Version 4.150.10.5 of the proprietary firmware works like a charm:

  1. The B43 firmware cutter tool is used to extract and install the proprietary Broadcom firmware. Use a LAN cable to get internet connection. Open a terminal and install it:
    su -c 'yum install b43-fwcutter'
  2. Download the firmware and use b43-fwcutter to extract and install it:
    su -
    cd /tmp
    wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
    tar xjf ./broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
    cd ./broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/
    b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware/ wl_apsta_mimo.o

    Reboot or restart the network. Your WLAN should work now.

Note: I tried several things before. Known solutions and b43-openfwwf were not able to provide a stable connection when using WPA2. Same for other versions of the proprietary Broadcom firmware.

1)
well: this is not true for all option models. But most of the ones shipped with FreeDOS instead of MS Windows were damn cheap.
I'm no native speaker (English)
Please let me know if you find any errors (I want to improve my English skills). Thank you!
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