Comment 38 for bug 85099

Just to be sure, I tried installing v4 firmware as per the instructions above. It was a mini-disaster. First, for the firmware which would seem to apply to my card, listed under bcmwl5.sys, both the links listed in the readme seem to be broken:

4.10.40.0 http://rapidshare.de/files/11458737/Broadcom_4.10.40.0_Drivers.cab.html
4.10.40.1 http://images.lunarpages.com/12002219.cab

The first url fetches something with a 2.7Kb size with an invalid MD5 checksum:

$ wget http://rapidshare.de/files/11458737/Broadcom_4.10.40.0_Drivers.cab.html
15:23:38 (776.16 KB/s) - `Broadcom_4.10.40.0_Drivers.cab.html' saved [2748/2748]

$ ./bcm43xx-fwcutter Broadcom_4.10.40.0_Drivers.cab.html
Sorry, the input file is either wrong or not supported by bcm43xx-fwcutter.
This file has an unknown MD5sum 780716436b475d93b9032c5b1549b1f7.

The second url is completely invalid:
$ wget http://images.lunarpages.com/12002219.cab
--15:26:05-- http://images.lunarpages.com/12002219.cab
           => `12002219.cab'
Resolving images.lunarpages.com... failed: Name or service not known.

Not to be deterred, I tried the wl_apsta.o driver:

$ wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2

Then I ran the fwcutter and copied to /lib/firmware and booted on the 2.6.20.8 kernel. Disaster. The wireless light on my laptop activated bringing hope, but the whole system locked up when I actually tried to connect to a network. Checking dmesg output revealed the folllowing:

[ 76.061108] bcm43xx: Firmware: no support for microcode extracted from version 4.x binary drivers.

So I recut the firmware from the original windows driver, deleted the firmware in /lib/firmware, recopied the original firmware, rebooted on 2.6.20.6, and was able to use my wireless card once again, to my relief.