Broadcom WiFi Wiki Updated
Hi all,
Long time, no speak. Shifting from private sector job to full-time freelance work took its toll. As a result, among other things, the Broadcom Wiki page http://wiki.CentOS.org/HowTos/Laptops/Wireless/Broadcom I “maintain” was neglected, and over the past couple of years I’ve been receiving e-mail inquiries about the Wiki and its applicability.
I’m happy to say and let you all know that the Wiki page has been updated with instructions for compiling the latest Broadcom driver with the latest kernel release, and the driver was tested. The current instructions are applicable to CentOS 6 x86_64, but I’m hoping to expand that to CentOS 7 as well. CentOS 5 instructions were removed. Of course, I can post compilation instructions for 5 also, but it’d be tested on a VM and the driver module wouldn’t actually go through proper testing. Your thoughts on this matter are certainly welcome.
The page is still being reviewed/edited by myself and could use
‘polishing’, but again, your feedback is always more than welcome and even desired!
2 thoughts on - Broadcom WiFi Wiki Updated
Hi Milos,
Always great to see folks contributing, so thanks for your efforts!
Regarding Step 4a: Loading the driver module into kernel:
modprobe understands module dependencies and will automatically resolve them whereas insmod does not. Therefore one should probably use modprobe to load the module.
You mix the usage of insmod and modprobe in section 4a – for consistency I would stick to modprobe at which point the discussion about manually loading module dependencies becomes irrelevant and could be removed to simplify the section.
I’ve also copied my reply to the CentOS-docs list.
Quoting Ned Slider:
Hello Ned,
I appreciate your prompt response, and definitely agree with you
regarding the insmod part. I was actually thinking of removing that
completely from the Wiki and leaving only the modprobe part of the 4a
section. In addition, it appears to cause confusion to user who are
not very tech/Linux savvy. The only reason why I left it there is
because at the time of the original document writing, there were some
issues where ‘insmod’ proved useful.
In addition, I just noticed that the boot-time module loading part is
obsolete by being applicable to CentOS 5, rather than 6. I’ll move on
and update that also.
Cheers, Milos.