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Broadcom STA driver in Fedora 11

So, the new Fedora 11 Leonidas is finally here. I stayed up to install it on my brand new laptop. Everything works out of the box, except wireless, and that only because Fedora insists on open source purity, so they won’t ship a binary driver. I did have some problems, though, so I’m just documenting them here.

My wireless device is a Dell 1510 card shown in lspci as:

Broadcom Corporation BCM4322 802.11a/b/g/n Wireless LAN Controller

Usually, you would just enable the RPMfusion repo and follow the instructions here (or here). Now I don’t know whether its a change in the broadcom-wl package contents, or just a missing dependency, but the broadcom-wl package only installs a modprobe blacklist file and some documentation, and NOT the kernel module wl.ko which is required for the driver.

After breaking my head over this a few times and trying unsuccessfully to compile Broadcom’s own source for the driver, I tried ‘yum install kmod-wl’ and magically, wireless started working. Hallelujah.

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