Installing BoardCom Wireless

1. Install b43-fwcutter. This is the software package that does the extraction of the firmware from the proprietary driver.
Code:

su
yum install b43-fwcutter

2. Determine which native driver is being used by the wireless card (b43 or b43legacy). The kernel is generally good about detecting a Broadcom wireless card and loading the correct driver module for it. The following terminal command will list the loaded kernel modules in alphabetical order. Look for b43 or b43legacy.
Code:

lsmod | sort

3. Do this step only if you need to install version 4 firmware for the b43 driver module. Copy and execute the following command lines one after the other in a Fedora terminal.
Code:

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
su
b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta_mimo.o

4. Do this step only if you need to install version 3 firmware for the b43legacy module.
Code:

wget http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o
su
b43-fwcutter -w /lib/firmware wl_apsta-3.130.20.0.o

5. Now reboot or restart NetworkManager and look in the NetworkManager panel applet icon for available networks (left-click the icon).

Some things to try if it doesn't work

1. Check the firmware files. There should be about three dozen .fw files in /lib/firmware/b43 (or /lib/firmware/b43legacy). If they're not there, then review the steps and re-install the firmware.
Code:

ls /lib/firmware/b43

2. Check the loaded kernel modules again. The b43 or b43legacy module should be loaded, and potentially conflicting modules such as wl or ndiswrapper should not be loaded.
Code:

lsmod | sort

3. If a conflicting module is being loaded from a previous driver effort, then either undo the steps from that previous effort, or blacklist the unwanted module. Example...
Code:

su
echo "blacklist ndiswrapper" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf