I tried. I really tried. Ultimately, I had to give up using the bcm43xx driver even though I have been advocating that you should be using a native driver for Linux. As you know, my laptop has a Broadcom chip as I have indicated elsewhere (see resources).
I have decided to move on to using ndiswrapper (see resources). I know that you it simply is a wrapper for the windows driver. However, the bcm43xx driver simply is not mature enough. While it is good enough for using over an Internet connection, it is a dog over a home network, especially if you plan to use wireless to backup or to send print jobs to remote printers. Also, good luck if you want to play videos over your home network.
Installation of ndiswrapper is very straight forward. Head over to the ndiswrapper homepage (see resources) and download the latest source (as of this writing version 1.13). There is a very good reason to download the source. You can simply make the driver yourself. You need to do this since the driver is entwined with the version of the kernel you are using. So, when you update with yum, make sure that you also download the latest kernel-devel package as well. You will also need to get the Windows drivers that works best with your machine. Note that this is not necessarily the ones that came with your PC. To determine the driver that you need, you will need to identify the ID of the chip thus
lspci
The output from this command should contain something like
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc ATI Radeon XPRESS 200M 5955 (PCIE) 06:02.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4318 [AirForce One 54g] 802.11g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 02) 06:04.0 CardBus bridge: Texas Instruments PCIxx21/x515 Cardbus Controller
In the above the pcid for the Network controller is 06:02.0. Once you have this, then do
lspci -n
which should give an output like
01:05.0 0300: 1002:5955 06:02.0 0280: 14e4:4318 (rev 02) 06:04.0 0607: 104c:8031
The ID of the chip is the sequence of numbers associated with (in my case) 06:02.0. This ID is 14e4:4318 (rev 02). Armed with this number, you can download the windows driver from the Ndiswrapper Wiki (see resources). This would be the Windows driver you would need to install once you install ndiswrapper. (I have uploaded the driver for my machine at my website. So, if you are lucky enough to have the same ID as my card, simply download this driver.) To install ndiswrapper, you need to do the following
make
make install
Once the ndiswrapper is installed, it is time to install the windows driver. To Unzip the driver and install it, do the following
unzip 80211g.zip
cd WL_T60H906\(8.0.10.0\,XP64_logo\)/
ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf
ndiswrapper -l
The final line above should output
Installed drivers: bcmwl5 driver installed, hardware present
If it does not say that hardware is present, you have not installed the correct windows driver. Make sure to follow the above as closely as possible.
That is it. Now all you have to do is modprobe ndiswrapper and your wireless should be visible as wlan0 (the default). Assign an IP address using dhclient wlan0 and you are in business.