broadcom 802.11g network adapter driver linux ubuntu

I hope this mini-HOWTO proves useful to you if you are in the process of installing a WMP54GS PCI NIC too leave a comment if it did (or didn’t - maybe I can help)! Identify what you’ve gotįirst, identify what you’ve actually got. I run Debian, but these instructions should help get you pointed in the right direction for the most part. Since I know that wireless NICs aren’t well supported under Linux for various reasons, I decided to log all I had to do to get this particular NIC working on my machine. This is important depending on where in the house I need to position the antenna to get the best signal and coverage. Not only that, but most USB NICs have dinky attached antennas, and the PCI card has a screw-on antenna that can be replaced with larger and presumably better antennas. I decided to go the PCI card route because I wanted to get 802.11g, but my host only has USB 1.1 and I didn’t want to spend the money on a USB 2.0 PCI card in addition to a new USB wireless NIC. Today, I ran out to CompUSA (instant gratification!) and bought myself a Linksys WMP54GS, which you can get at for around $59.99. So, I decided it was time to buy a slightly better supported wireless NIC and stop fussing with this piece of junk. Watching the latest at76c503 driver try to download the firmware resulted in an 'unexpected opcode 146' error.

I built the new driver, installed it, and everything worked fine - until the powerloss.

However, when upgrading to 2.6.x, I discovered this meant also needing to upgrade to a more recent version of the at76c503 driver, which was fine since my NIC already had the 0.90.2-140 firmware downloaded to it. I discovered that my particular WUSB11-V26 only worked with the 0.90.2-140 revision of the firmware (newer firmwares wouldn’t turn the radio on) - once I learned this, everything was fine, I’d just hack the driver source to use the older firmware and everything was fine.

It worked pretty well, but then I upgraded to a 2.6.x kernel and while it continued to work for a short time, when we suffered a prolonged power outage, the NIC refused to work when power came back. For a long time (especially with the 2.4.x kernels), I’d been using a Linksys WUSB11-V26 with the Atmel RFMD 503 as the wireless NIC for my home network, using the at76c503 driver.

Broadcom 802.11g network adapter driver linux ubuntu