Thanks for your continuing help and hope I'm not starting to get on your nerves! However, I've tried the driver/firmware loading as per the various links you snet but still no joy.
Despite the fact that lspci does show up a broadcom wifi controller, I am still concerned that there is some other issue about communication with the card.
Following through the instructions in the first thread (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1490717) I compared some of the output from commands. For example, in the thread:
$ iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 IEEE 802.11bg ESSIDff/any
Mode:Managed Access Point: Not-Associated Tx-Power=0 dBm
Retry long limit:7 RTS thrff Fragment thrff
Encryption keyff
Power Managementff
but on my system:
$ iwconfig wlan0
wlan0 No such device
On the thread, partial output of lshw -C network:
capabilities: bus_master
configuration: driver=b43-pci-bridge latency=32
resources: irq:17 memory:dfff8000-dfff9fff
*-network DISABLED
description: Wireless interface
physical id: 1
logical name: wlan0
serial: 00:11:50:1c:31:a8
capabilities: ethernet physical wireless
configuration: broadcast=yes multicast=yes wireless=IEEE 802.11bg
where all I get is:
capabilities: bus_master
configuration: latency=32
resources: memory:f0500000-f0501fff
Thread again:
lsmod | grep b4
b43 157827 0
mac80211 204922 1 b43
cfg80211 126517 2 b43,mac80211
led_class 2864 1 b43
ssb 37336 1 b43
Mine:
$ lsmod | grep b4
$
It seems to me that in the case of the example that worked, the system can clearly "see" the broadcom card, whereas in my case I'm not so sure that it can.
I am still concerned about the card slots issue. This is in dmesg:
[ 0.168566] EISA bus registered
[ 0.645578] EISA: Probing bus 0 at eisa.0
[ 0.645588] Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 1
[ 0.645593] Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 2
[ 0.645597] Cannot allocate resource for EISA slot 3
[ 0.645621] EISA: Detected 0 cards.
This looks to me as if this computer is not going to work with any cards plugged into any of these expansion slots, yet that's exactly what the wifi is. If I am wrong and it doesn't mean that, I would be grateful to know what it does mean.
Thanks again,
Paul