WiFi

[haitham.babbili]

Hello!

I'm new in CentOS and Linux OS and i had installed in my laptop CentOS-7-x86_x64-DVD.iso
I have Dell laptop. It is Latitude E6320.
After installing, i had problem which is the Wireless does not work and it's not exist at all in the system i can't see it. it just like there is no WiFi device in my laptop. I'm connecting to the internet by cable. and i had tried lshw command and show me this.



*-network
description: Network controller
product: BCM43228 802.11a/b/g/n
vendor: Broadcom Limited
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
version: 00
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=bcma-pci-bridge latency=0
resources: irq:17 memory:e2d00000-e2d03fff

so please I need help.

[bonedome]

Hello and welcome to the wonderful world of Gnu/Linux
I have a Dell Latitude 6420, it (unfortunately) has broadcom wireless.
lshw shows

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 *-network
                description: Wireless interface
                product: BCM4313 802.11bgn Wireless Network Adapter
                vendor: Broadcom Limited
                physical id: 0
                bus info: pci@0000:02:00.0
                logical name: wlp2s0
                version: 01
                serial: 44:6d:57:d8:0c:bb
                width: 64 bits
                clock: 33MHz

I suspect your laptop also has broadcom
There is a built in (open source) kernel module which should load automatically.
To start it manually, log in as root

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su -

then, one at a time

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rmmod b43
rmmod ssb
rmmod bcma
modprobe brcmsmac

It worked out of the box for me, but has incredibly slow download speed (2 Mb/s) compared to the hybrid broadcom wireless module (36 Mb/s)
I followed this guide https://elrepo.org/tiki/wl-kmod to build the hybrid wl-kmod rpm.
The only addition to the guide is to also install the kernel-headers package, but if you follow the centos 7 guide word for word it's not too difficult.
Hopefully this helps and it's not dead hardware.

[toracat]

I followed this guide https://elrepo.org/tiki/wl-kmod to build the hybrid wl-kmod rpm.
The only addition to the guide is to also install the kernel-headers package, but if you follow the centos 7 guide word for word it's not too difficult.

Did you really have to install kernel-headers? I assume you are referring to the ELRepo guide, not CentOS. ?

[bonedome]

Hello
here's the short version.
I initially tried to build the module (wl.ko) for the elrepo ml-kernel (4.10 at the time I think) and it refused to build without 4.10 kernel-headers, unfortunately even though it built, it needs some patches and would lock up the system if used.
So I used the elrepo guide to build the (3.10 kernel) rpm, I erased the 4.10 headers and installed the 3.10, I may well not have needed to, but with my initial experience I thought it wise to install the 3.10 headers to prevent previous build errors.
So in conclusion, you might not need the headers package to build the rpm but at 3.3 Mb it's not doing any harm.