Fedora 18 No Wireless

Question

Just installed Fedora 18 and I can't get the wireless to work.
What do I have and what have I done?

I have a Broadcom BCM4312 which is supported by the broadcom-wl driver. (link)

lspci | grep Network
00:19.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82567LM Gigabit Network Connection (rev 03)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)

I have installed the driver and the kernel modules for it:

rpm -qa | grep -e '-wl' | sort
akmod-wl-5.100.82.112-7.fc18.4.i686
broadcom-wl-5.100.82.112-4.fc18.noarch
kmod-wl-3.7.4-204.fc18.i686-5.100.82.112-7.fc18.8.i686

The kernel:

uname -r
3.7.4-204.fc18.i686

I have loaded the module

modprobe wl

lsmod | sort | grep wl
cfg80211              171182  1 wl
lib80211               13684  1 wl
wl                   2465403  0 

And even removed the ssb module, which I read on couple forums.
Restarted the service, and even rebooted:

service NetworkManager restart

After all these, the wireless card is still not visible. What am I missing?

Answer 1

Try service NetworkManager stop. It will just interfere with any attempt to manual configure and debug the set-up.

Now try iwconfig. Hopefully you see mention of an interface that isn't described with "no wireless extensions". Presuming that is wlan0 (it could be something else), try:

ifconfig wlan0 up && iwlist wlan0 scanning

You should see some copious output detailing the detected wifi networks, which means your driver is working, or working well enough to scan. Which does not necessarily mean it is working well enough to be useful beyond this, but it probably is. The next step is to try configuring the interface to connect to a network...

Answer 2

I was originally running kernel 3.7.4-204.fc18.i686 with kmod-wl-3.7.4-204.fc18.i686-5.100.82.112-7.fc18.8.i686 and the wireless had issues. After 2 more updates of the kernel it just works fine.

So this is what I have running and working good now:

sly@localhost ~$ uname -r
3.7.6-201.fc18.i686
sly@localhost ~$ rpm -qa | grep -e '-wl' | sort
akmod-wl-5.100.82.112-7.fc18.4.i686
broadcom-wl-5.100.82.112-4.fc18.noarch
kmod-wl-3.7.6-201.fc18.i686-5.100.82.112-7.fc18.10.i686
sly@localhost ~$ lsmod | sort | grep wl
cfg80211              171182  1 wl
lib80211               13684  2 wl,lib80211_crypt_tkip
wl                   2465403  0 

Answer 3

I had all these same problems on my HP mini 1001,

I found so many people having the same problems so i thought i would add my solution, my wireless connection is completely fine and working on fedora 18. wired connection i havent even tested but would probably work in the same way.

I followed the instructions on this page - http://www.putorius.net/2011/03/installing-fedora-11-on-hp-mini-1030nr.html

After that it still didnt really work, so i followed these instructions on this page - http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=269331 namely this command:

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     su b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o  

Finally to get the wireless to work, I went into the network management settings by clicking on the network icon then on manage network connections, finally the wireless tab was clickable so i opened it, then i added a wireless network, In the SSID field, click the scan button, then select your wifi network. next, in the BSSID click select, then ok and close. then click ok and it should ask you for your network password.

this worked for me, i hope it works for you