These are my rough notes from getting a Dell D600 laptop's Broadcom wireless card to start up

Take laptop, boot from a live CD (I'm using Ubuntu Feisty)

zero the hard-drive to wipe out any old MBR
  # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda bs=1024 count=1

create 128M partition for voyage and nothing else (no swap)
  # fdisk /dev/sda
  n(ew) p(rimary) 1 1 +128M
  a(ctivate) 1
  w(rite)

(at this point Ubuntu will automount what used to be in that location. Unmount it)
  umount /media/disk

put a no-check ext2 fs on there
  mkfs.ext2 /dev/sda1
  tune2fs -c 0 /dev/sda1

(Voyage doesn't write to the root filesystem, so we don't need to bother with fsck)


download latest voyage tar and extract to temporary location
  tar jxf voyage-current.tar.bz2
  cd voyage-current

install on hdd
  ./usr/local/sbin/voyage.update
  (default) (default) (default) 4 [notebook with pcmcia]
  (default) /dev/sda (default) /mnt (default) (default) (default) (default) 2 [console] (default) y (default)

mount the hdd so we can play with it before it activates
  mount /dev/sda1 /mnt

This gives us a working OS. We have a bcm43xx-mac80211 driver available, but no firmware for it ...
Install bcm43xx-fwcutter on the ubuntu live cd - enable universe repository first
  aptitude install bcm43xx-fwcutter

This will download wp_asta.o and unpack firmware from it, but we don't want any of that - it's an old version
  rm -rf /lib/firmware/*

http://cross-lfs.org/view/clfs-embedded/wrt/materials/packages-wrt.html tells us that the v4 Firmware can be found on OpenWRT's website, at http://downloads.openwrt.org/sources/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0.tar.bz2

Unpack the tarfile locally, cd /mnt/lib/firmware, and use fwcutter to extract the data
  bcm43xx-fwcutter /root/broadcom-wl-4.80.53.0/kmod/wl_apsta.0

Now the firmware is available, we need to make sure the module is loaded. Add to the end of /mnt/etc/modules
  bcm43xx-mac80211

At this point you can boot your new OS if you like, but if you know what you want to edit you may as well stay on the liveCD and not have to say 'remountrw' :-)


Now your network configuration is obviously site dependant. By default voyage seems to be wanting to ast as an AP, but
I want it to be a WLAN client. I also don't have any eth0 plugged in, and don't need to waste time configging that.
Plus, I'm on a WPA PSK TKIP network, so I'll be using wpa_supplicant to bring up the interface, invoked automatically
by the network tools

In /mnt/etc/network/interfaces
  auto wlan0
  iface wlan0 inet dhcp
	wpa-driver wext
	wpa-ssid Your Unquoted SSID
	wpa-key-mgmt WPA-PSK
	wpa-proto WPA
	wpa-pairwise TKIP
	wpa-group TKIP
	wpa-psk YourWPAPassword
	wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

On boot wlan0 should come up :-)