Installing Breezy on HP Pavilion zv6000 (wireless driver)

[Gian Piero Carzino]

This is the third part of the story: at the end we came to the Broadcom
Wireless interface.

Perhaps everybody knows that, without specs of the card, you have to use
ndiswrapper... and load the Windows driver...

But the windows driver shipped with the Pavilion is a 32 bit driver, and
the 64 bit version of ndiswrapper refuses to load it.

Not a great issue: one goes to Broadcom site and downloads the 64 bit one.

I couldn't find a driver which was 64 bit AND fit for Broadcom BCM4318
(which is the chip used in ZV6000 as lspci -n says 14E4:4318) neither at
Broadcom or 54g site, nor at Linuxant or HP:

BMCWL564.SYS (found at Linuxant, in the file
64-bit_Broadcom54g_Drivers.zip) supports 4301, 4303, 4307, 4320 and 4325
chips BUT fails on 4318

on the other side BCMWL5.SYS (the one found at HP site, in the file
SP30379.exe) really detects the hardware, BUT is 32 bit, and fails
loading on ndiswrapper

After some other googling I eventually found that Acer Ferrari is 64 bit
AND caries the same Broadcom chip (4318): fortunately Acer has provided
the driver for 64 bit windows...

ftp://ftp.support.acer-euro.com/notebook/ferrari_4000/driver/winxp64bit/80211g.zip

And this one finally was loaded and the wireless light went on.

I cannot be sure it works, because I have no Wifi nearby (also the other
O.S. didn't find any)... but wlan0 came out, iwconfig is happy, so I
think I found the right driver.

P.S. to fix the color of the splash in the boot screen, you must raise
frame buffer color to 16 or 24 bit (i.e. vga=788 or vga=792 or whatever
is NOT 8 bit, in kernel parameters in grub)

-- 
Gian Piero Carzino
<gcarzino at tiscali.it>