Fedora 15 on a HP Compaq 615 laptop: WLAN

The HPC 615 was very popular because of its attractive cost-performance ratio.¹⁾ I just installed Fedora 15 Lovelock on a HPC 615 with AMD Athlon X2, 320GiB HDD, ATI Radeon HD3200 and 4GiB RAM. Everything works out-of-the-box with one exception: Wireless LAN. There was no firmware for the Broadcom BCM4312 WLAN chip. However. Version 4.150.10.5 of the proprietary firmware works like a charm:

The B43 firmware cutter tool is used to extract and install the proprietary Broadcom firmware. Use a LAN cable to get internet connection. Open a terminal and install it:
```
su -c 'yum install b43-fwcutter'
```

Download the firmware and use b43-fwcutter to extract and install it:

su -
cd /tmp
wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
tar xjf ./broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5.tar.bz2
cd ./broadcom-wl-4.150.10.5/driver/
b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware/ wl_apsta_mimo.o

Reboot or restart the network. Your WLAN should work now.

Note: I tried several things before. Known solutions and b43-openfwwf were not able to provide a stable connection when using WPA2. Same for other versions of the proprietary Broadcom firmware.

¹⁾

well: this is not true for all option models. But most of the ones shipped with FreeDOS instead of MS Windows were damn cheap.