I’ve got one of those delightful broadcom network chips in my PowerBook, which didn’t have Linux support for a long time. Thanks for nothing Broadcom, you bastards. All the thanks go to the guys who have spent long hours reverse engineering it, and developing a driver from scratch for it. Big ups.

This post is actually about how I got NetworkManager running on Gentoo with the bcm43xx. There are two patches to the ieee80211softmac package, which I needed to get it to work. The first is a patch which defaults the wireless to 11M, rather than 54M (as the driver doesn’t yet drop down the rate until it associates), and the second is a patch which makes softmac send the right signals out to alert the system when it has actually associated.

I have made an ebuild which incorporates these two patches, which you can grab from here. Just extract this to your own local portage overlay, and emerge ieee80211softmac-r20060329, to try it out.

You need to emerge dhcp, dhcdbd and NetworkManager from the Gentopia overlay, and make sure that you have the latest wpa_supplicant. I had to create the /var/run/wpa_supplicant directory every time I wanted to run NetworkManager, or it just wouldn’t work.

Good luck