Installing Broadcom Wireless Drivers on Linux Fedora 17 (RHL)

7 Replies

Recently, the business I consult for, Pallas Couture, required one of their laptops (Dell Vostro 1310) to be reformatted with the bare essentials.

So I thought, what better operating system than Fedora for this task? It’s easy to use, good-looking and secure.

One caveat, drivers.

The Dell Vostro 13x series require the appropriate broadcom-wl drivers to be installed in order to enable wireless access, which was an absolute essential.

Assuming you have Fedora and have launched Terminal, let’s get started.

Installing RPM Fusion

RPM Fusion is essentially a third-party repository that adds some extra packages to YUM:

“RPM Fusion provides software that the Fedora Project or Red Hat doesn’t want to ship. That software is provided as precompiled RPMs for all current Fedora versions and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 and 6; you can use the RPM Fusion repositories with tools like yum and PackageKit.” – RPM Fusion

You can install RPM Fusion by issuing the following command in your Terminal:

su -c 'yum localinstall --nogpgcheck http://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-stable.noarch.rpm http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-stable.noarch.rpm'

You will be prompted for the root login password (if applicable) shortly after. Enter it to proceed.

Update YUM

Next, we’ll update YUM so we have the newest packages prior to installing the broadcom-wl drivers.

To update YUM, issue the following command:

yum update

Installing the Broadcom Wireless Drivers (broadcom-wl)

Now we’re getting somewhere.

In order to install the broadcom-wl drivers, enter the following into your Terminal session:

yum install broadcom-wl

Loading the Drivers using Modprobe

In order to load the new drivers, issue the following command:

su -c 'modprobe wl'

Restart Fedora

Now, you just need to restart (or reboot) Fedora in order to apply the changes by issuing:

reboot

You’re done! Go play with your wireless.

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  • Jack

    Absolute life saver! Thank you thank you thank you

    • http://drewsymo.com Drew

      Not a problem, Jack! Glad you found the tutorial helpful.

  • Ramon

    Hi!

    When I issue the last command “su -c ‘modprobe wl’” I get the following error message:
    “FATAL: Module wl not found.”
    Any help please?

    • Ramon

      One more information. My Notebook is a Dell Inspiron 15R SE.

      • Ramon

        Problem resolved. It was not the right driver for my notebook.
        Cheers.

        • http://drewsymo.com Drew

          Not a problem! What drivers did you end up installing for your Dell Inspiron 15R SE?

  • Shawn

    This method works for me but the fatal issue is that it locks up Fedora everytime i use it for short period of time. Wireless card is WMP300N rv01 which is BCM4321 chipset.. is there work around on this?