Friday 29 February 2008

BT Voyager 1060 Wireless PCMCIA Card on Ubuntu

This will probably work on most/all models of systems. Im using an IBM Thinkpad 600 in this example.

After converting from the dark side to my first release of Linux, namely Xubuntu 7.10, my first problem was installing the wireless card named above.

The Linux kernel version 2.6.22 included in Ubuntu 7.10 uses the bcm43xx driver for Broadcom wireless cards.

The firmware code is still not distributed with Ubuntu and must be downloaded and extracted before bcm43xx will work.

2 files are required in order for the network card to work. These are:

installation file - bcm43xx-fwcutter, which can be found here:
http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/pool/universe/b/bcm43xx-fwcutter/bcm43xx-fwcutter_006-3_i386.deb


and the firmware, which can be found here:
http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o


Once you have the files onto the machine in question, double click on 'bcm43xx-fwcutter' to start the package installer. During installation it will ask you if you would like it to fetch and extract the firmware. This step will fail without an Internet connection so just click 'forward' and then close the the package installer.

Open Applications>System>Restricted Drivers Manager and you will see under the firmware drop down arrow it says Firmware for Broadcom 43xx chipset famiy and under Status it says not in use. Tick the enable the firmware box.

Click enable firmware.

Select use local file and browse to the wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o firmware file that you downloaded previously anc click open. Click OK to extract the firmware.

If the status has changed to In Use then you are successful.

You can now go into Network Connection and connect to your network.

1 comment:

Thompo007 said...

this might be a long time after this post, but thanks very much, super helpful! just installed ubuntu on an old laptop and your info worked a treat to get this card working