Installing broadcom b43 wireless drivers on dell d630 fedora 26

Although Fedora ships wireless drivers, they don’t work properly with some non-Intel based wireless cards as in my case.

1. Check the wireless device manufacturer:

[root@server ~]# lspci
0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Limited BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)
0c:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Limited BCM4311 802.11a/b/g (rev 01)

2. Download the drivers:

wget https://sources.openwrt.org/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2

3. Extract the drivers:

[cipher ~]$ tar -xvf broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/
[cipher ~]$ cd broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/

4. Install driver using b43-cutter tool (it already comes installed with Fedora; if not present install with dnf install b43-cutter -y):

[cipher ~]$ b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o

5. Load the driver with modprobe:

[cipher ~]$ sudo modprobe b43

6. Reboot the system and you should see wifi working now:

[cipher ~/test/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5]$ ifconfig wlan0
wlan0: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 192.168.0.28 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 192.168.0.255