The title says it all. I’ve spent this whole morning trying to get this shitty  broadcom sta wireless driver to work in my Slackware box. The reason is the quality signal is way better than the native kernel driver (b43).

Firstly, I needed a patch for my kernel (2.6.27). I used at least 3 different patches to make the compilation work. This man has a working one since he was kind enough to add the patch to the driver source already: http://www.cenolan.com/broadcom-wl/

After that, all I did was follow this official guide: http://www.broadcom.com/docs/linux_sta/README.txt

I did exactly what I was told, and it didn’t work. With the help from <macavity> in ##slackware, I did further tweaks hoping to get the driver working in vain.

With no alternative left, I had to remove b43 and SSB from the blacklist and reenable them again. At least I still have my Wifi, though it may be tough to be in areas where signals are crappy. But I still have Ubuntu with out-of-the-box Broadcom support. Popularity does help, right?

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Photo Credit: Todd*