B43 won't recognise Broadcom 4312 wireless card

Question

I've had a Dell XPS M1530 laptop for a few weeks now. It's got a Dell 1395 wireless card, which is actually a disguised Broadcom 4312 card.
lspci recognises it as such:
[sander@lappy686 ~]$ lspci | grep -i broadcom
0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g (rev 01)
The card works fine with the properietary broadcom-wl drivers. I'm using these right now, in fact.
However, I'd like to use b43 if at all possible, because:
- b43 supports monitor mode;
- broadcom-wl drivers are proprietary, whereas the b43 ones are open.
I have followed the guide on the wiki to extract the firmware from the proprietary drivers:
[sander@lappy686 ~]$ sudo ls /lib/firmware/b43/
a0g0bsinitvals4.fw a0g0initvals9.fw a0g1initvals5.fw b0g0bsinitvals9.fw lp0bsinitvals13.fw lp0initvals15.fw pcm5.fw ucode4.fw
a0g0bsinitvals5.fw a0g1bsinitvals13.fw a0g1initvals9.fw b0g0initvals13.fw lp0bsinitvals14.fw n0absinitvals11.fw ucode11.fw ucode5.fw
a0g0bsinitvals9.fw a0g1bsinitvals5.fw b0g0bsinitvals13.fw b0g0initvals4.fw lp0bsinitvals15.fw n0bsinitvals11.fw ucode13.fw ucode9.fw
a0g0initvals4.fw a0g1bsinitvals9.fw b0g0bsinitvals4.fw b0g0initvals5.fw lp0initvals13.fw n0initvals11.fw ucode14.fw
a0g0initvals5.fw a0g1initvals13.fw b0g0bsinitvals5.fw b0g0initvals9.fw lp0initvals14.fw pcm4.fw ucode15.fw
when I insert the b43 module (sudo modprobe b43), the following shows up in /var/log/everything.log:
Nov 7 20:58:36 lappy686 Broadcom 43xx driver loaded [ Features: PMLR, Firmware-ID: FW13 ]
... and nothing more. I was told that this isn't normal
The actual problem is that no network interface shows up in ifconfig / iwconfig. The only ones that are there are lo and eth0 (wired ethernet). When I use broadcom-wl, the wireless interface shows up as "eth1".
I have also tried to extract the firmware from some older versions of the driver, but the same thing happens. What's curious is that it'll still say "Firmware-ID: FW13" in /var/log/everything.log...
So, anybody have any clues? I guess it's not that urgent, but it sucks that I have to use a  proprietary driver. The only other option I haven't tried is ndiswrapper, and frankly, I'm not sure I want to

Answer 1

On my machine:
lspci | grep -i broadcom
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4401-B0 100Base-TX (rev 02)
0b:00.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4311 802.11b/g WLAN (rev 01)
dmesg | grep -i broadcom
b43-phy0: Broadcom 4311 WLAN found
Broadcom 43xx driver loaded [ Features: PMLR, Firmware-ID: FW13 ]
grep MODULES /etc/rc.conf
MODULES=(b43 !b44 !pcspkr !snd_pcsp)
I wanted to look at the MODULES section on your machine because, indeed, I was planning to suggest something along the lines of "b43 !wl". Now I suppose that it would not work (as you seem to have already tried it).