Arch64 with Broadcom 4312 wireless

Note: This post is from quite a while back and mostly kept here for my own records in case I need it again.

Well, after trying for a few hours, I may have finally found a way to get my wireless working reliably. It’s worked longer than the other options anyway. Click Read More to get the full details.

I’m using Arch64 (64 bit version of Archlinux) which works quite well. There are some things like flash & java that can be a real pain to setup. And with ndiswrapper 1.53 which is the latest version in both the 32 bit & 64 bit repo, it likes to lock up the system. Or in my case, complain about the ndiswrapper from the beginning under 64 (I had the laptop running under regular Archlinux for about 8 months or so, it worked pretty stable under both b43 and ndiswrapper though I did have to switch to ndiswrapper at my mother’s since I connect there with peer to peer instead of a router and b43 wouldn’t work that way).

Why was I using ndiswrapper under arch64 instead of b43? (or trying to anyway) Thats because every few minutes the wireless would lock up. Not good for watching movies from my desktop or downloading files or even just surfing. So in other words, everything I do with my laptop pretty much.

So after much fussing and fighting (and attempting to use my old trick of ndiswrapper 1.52 install until a few minutes later i remember oh yeah, this is 64bit, I’m trying to install the 32bit ndiswrapper), I stumbled upon a post that reminded me of the broadcom drivers in AUR which I hadn’t tried.

The basics of it are to:
yaourt -S broadcom-wl
sudo rmmod b43
sudo rmmod ssb
sudo rmmod bcm43xx
modprobe wl

You also need to blacklist the b43, ssb & bcm43xx modules in /etc/rc.conf

Then you just need to use wicd or another manager (or command line if you are really bored) and connect with the new interface (note that it will show up as ethX instead of like wlanX). So far, it’s working stable though I’m not sure about speed, it seems to be kind of slow but if it’s stable and slower, it’s better than fast but never working.