Asiri's Laboratory

Installing broadcom wireless drivers on a linux system is pretty simple, just download the driver source from http://www.broadcom.com/support/802.11/linux_sta.php and follow the instructions on the README file. However, if you are running CentOS5 you might be faced with an error message during the compilation phase that reads something like below:

[asiri@asiri-laptop hybrid_wl]$ make
KBUILD_NOPEDANTIC=1 make -C /lib/modules/`uname -r`/build M=`pwd`
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-194.3.1.el5-PAE-i686'
 LD      /home/asiri/software/hybrid_wl/built-in.o
 CC [M]  /home/asiri/software/hybrid_wl/src/shared/linux_osl.o
In file included from /home/asiri/software/hybrid_wl/src/shared/linux_osl.c:17:
/home/asiri/software/hybrid_wl/src/include/typedefs.h:80: error: conflicting types for ‘bool’
include/linux/types.h:36: error: previous declaration of ‘bool’ was here
make[2]: *** [/home/asiri/software/hybrid_wl/src/shared/linux_osl.o] Error 1
make[1]: *** [_module_/home/asiri/software/hybrid_wl] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-194.3.1.el5-PAE-i686'
make: *** [all] Error 2

Now I can’t say much about the reasons for this error but you can simply work around it by commenting out three lines from the source file src/include/typedefs.h (lines 79 – 81):

//ifndef TYPEDEF_BOOL
//typedef  unsigned char  bool;
//endif

I didn’t discover this solution myself; I found it on a forum couple of months back when I was setting up a different installation and thought of logging it here just in case I bump into it again