Dear Maintainer,

the driver does not work with Broadcom BCM4352 as installed in Dell XPS 13
Developer Edition, v 9343.

   * What led up to the situation?

Installation of Debian 8 from debian-8.0.0-amd64-netinst.iso on Dell XPS 13
DE.

   * What exactly did you do (or not do) that was effective (or
     ineffective)?

Installation of broadcom-sta-dkms is partially effective, insofar as the
module loads and apparently the hardware is detected. This leads to the
creation of the wlan0 interface. However, the interface does not allow to
scan for access points (via wicd) and manual configuration via
/etc/network/interfaces does not lead to a working WiFi connection, though
the same configuration works on other Debian machines with the same AP.

   * What was the outcome of this action?

No functional WiFi.

   * What outcome did you expect instead?

Functional WiFi.


Further remarks:

- I am forced to submit this report not from the installation
in question, but from another computer, because I was not able to get Debian
into a usable state on the XPS 13. System information below is therefore only
approximate.

- Installation from the original code downloaded from Broadcom,
hybrid-v35_64-nodebug-pcoem-6_30_223_248.tar.gz, failed because it appears
to not use the correct API calls for the current Linux kernel.

- There appears to be a package with a working driver for Ubuntu, with the
name bcmwl-kernel-source_6.30.223.141+bdcom-0ubuntu2_amd64.deb. I suspect
that Ubuntu patched the Broadcom code to compile on current kernels. It is
possible that these patched could be adapted for Debian.

Carsten, Cyril,

Although some people find that bcmwl-kernel-source works on Ubuntu
others report it doesn't even tho their config is the same. I have
posted the results of experiments here that might help to explain why:
<http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2283001&p=13310316&mode=threaded#post13310316>
The driver doesn't appear to adapt down its rate when reception becomes
poor, so it only works over a very limited distance (~5m) and remains
connected but fails to receive any data over longer ranges. (There are
lots more experiments leading up to this conclusion if you want to go
back over the whole thread).

When booted into Windows8.1, the same machine continues to operate (at
progressively lower rate) up to about 35m range.

More generally, if some people complain a driver isn't working and
others claim it is, it would be worth asking them to try it over shorter
/ longer range respectively.

HTH


Bob