B43 BroadCom Wireless Driver sucks as hell

Yes, I don't like that driver.

The story continued with me being disappointed of not being able to set up my wireless settings.

# wifi-menu
"No such interface found: wlan0"

Oh noooo, c'mon!

Ok, so I went to that page ArchLinux told me about, when it finished loading. The system said something like the driver could not be loaded or so...

http://wireless.kernel.org/en/users/Drivers/b43#devicefirmware

Fedora, Ubuntu, ... Bla bla bla...a little bit further, hmm, oh no, ArchLinux is not listed. No good news!

So the last chance -> "Other distributions not mentioned above"

And right below that the warning: "Note: You need to have a compiler and headers for libc installed, since you will have to build fwcutter from source".

Well, I don't have internet access, I don't have a OS installed! No, of course I can't compile stuff! Holy ....arghhhh!

How to solve that problem:

Actually I created a little script for you (you need to put it on your flash drive as well and make it executable 'chmod +x scriptname'), however you need another computer and a flash drive to get the required packages.

1. Download b43-fwcutter binary packages:
 Go: https://www.archlinux.org/packages/core/i686/b43-fwcutter/
and click on Download from other mirror

2. Download broadcom driver

http://www.lwfinger.com/b43-firmware/broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2

Put both packages on a flash drive and insert it in the computer running archlinux from the boot cd.
Mount the flash drive by entering
# fdisk -l                    # find out which device is the flash drive
# mount  /dev/sdb1 /media     # if /dev/sdb1 is the flash drive

The script:



mkdir /b43
cd /b43
cp /media/b43* .
cp /media/broad* .
pacman -U b43-fwcutter-*
export FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR="/lib/firmware"
tar xjf broadcom-wl-5.100.138.tar.bz2
b43-fwcutter -w "$FIRMWARE_INSTALL_DIR" broadcom-wl-5.100.138/linux/wl_apsta.o 
modprobe -r b43 bcma 
modprobe -r brcmsmac bcma 
modprobe -r wl
modprobe b43

This should do it, let me know if you have problems with that.

# wifi-menu
--> The menu starts, yippeh! 

Hope that helped somebody else! 

The first step

So I decided to install Arch Linux. That's already the point where it got messy.

Well there is no GUI as I know it from other distributions to install the OS, no just plain command line. How awesome is that, until, yeah until you got stuck like I did.


Well I followed the official ArchWiki right there:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Installation_Guide#Keyboard_layout

So I created a boot partition by using the tool gdisk. Not too hard, if you know that the first partition on a disk should start at 2048. Boot should be about 100 MB in size, so enter +100M for the ending section (yeah I struggled with that command already, how should I know on which sector I want the partition to end? Well, if I would have asked the manual I already knew that there is the possibility of relative size input). After figuring that out the partitioning went smoothly through and I created a LVM containing a SWAP and ROOT as well as a HOME partition.

The instruction for creating a LVM can be found here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Lvm


Then, and then, the real problem came up: The wireless driver b43...