Ubuntu, NM, nm-applet, bcm43xx and acerhk on Acer Aspire SOLUTION (partial):

["Michael Doube" <michael doube net>]

Hi all,

I was having trouble getting Fedora Core 4 to work with NM so installed Ubuntu instead.  Had similar problems getting the card to associate under Ubuntu, but have found what might be a temporary solution (at least, it works for me.)

lspci lists my card as:
0000:06:05.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02)

It's in an Acer Aspire 3023 WLMi, and I believe the chipset (the bcm4318) is quite widespread.

1. Get rid of ndiswrapper and remove all references to eth0 and eth1 in /etc/network/interfaces. You can blacklist the ndiswrapper kernel module as well.

2. then you need to download acerhk, compile and install according to instructions. You can get it here:
http://www2.informatik.hu-berlin.de/~tauber/acerhk/
(I don't know if there are alternatives for other notebook marques, good support for most Acers though)

3. bcm43xx is included in the default kernel in Ubuntu Dapper, make use of it. At boot, though, I've been doing 

~$ sudo modprobe -r bcm43xx

followed by 

~$ sudo modprobe bcm43xx

4.  then load the acerhk driver

~$ sudo modprobe acerhk

5. and activate eth1 by

~$ sudo echo 1 > /proc/driver/acerhk/wirelessled

(wait a few seconds)

(ha ha, who likes Pseudo Echo??)

6. Wait a bit for NetworkManager to re-scan the airwaves, then select your AP from the nm-applet list.

acerhk used to be necessary to get ndswrapper to load. I think it operates at a pretty low level to get the hardware to initialise. Anyway, it seems to provide the kick in the guts that the bcm4318 requires to get working.

Best of luck, and thanks to all the developers

Mike