Wireless Card Help
 

So I just installed slackware 11.0 on my system and love it. I had to install the 2.6.17.13 kernel because it was the only one that supported the chipset on my viewsonic 802.11g card. Once installed I used installpkg to install the packages from the /extra directory on disk 2. I brought up the X window system and everything worked fine, but I can't figure out how to turn my wireless card on. I'm sure there's a simple way to do this, but I'm new to this.
Thanks for your help!
Ben

Give us a look at the result of iwconfig ... just checking that card really has been supported.

If you installed a GUI, there is usually a tool for handling wireless like kwifimanager.

You need to say what kind of wireless card it is.

Have a read of...
http://rootprompt.org/article.php3?article=9144

Okay, so when I am first starting up slack and watch the script running, I can see it recognizing my bcm43xx driver on my viewsonic card. It lists the different attributes of my card, like whether or not the radio is on/off, among other things. In Kwifi manager, when running the configuration, I check the auto detect box but my card is not recognized. When I manually type in bcm43xx in the box, nothing happens.
Thanks in advance,
Ben

It is quite difficult to diagnose a problem when the requested data is not forthcoming. (Please read the long advice in my sig then reread post #2.)

To tell me what kind of card you have, please report the entry in the pci list you get with the lspci command. Please open a terminal and type "lspci" (without quotes), press enter, then look through the result for mention of your wireless card. Copy that, and paste it to the forum.

From the above, I am guessing you have a broadcom based card... and I am hoping it is pci or pcmcia and not a usb dongle or somesuch.

To give me a look at the output of iwconfig, please open a terminal and type "iwconfig" (without quotes) then press enter. Copy the result and paste it to the forum.

Have you read the article in the link? (Post #2)


Your reference to the card/driver showing up in the boot messages suggests you should look through your syslog for entries pertaining to your card. Especially after attempts to configure it. Open a terminal and type in "dmesg" (without quotes), press enter, and hunt through the result for mention of your card. The result from lspci will be particularly helpful with this. Please copy and paste anything that actually mentions your card, wifi, driver and so forth to the forum.

Note: you may get a more usable result with "dmesg | more".


That you are using bcm43xx driver is useful, provided this is the right driver for your card. If your card is broadcom 4300 - 4399, then...

Have a look at the output of lsmod, to make sure that the bcm43xx driver is actually loaded. Sounds like it was loaded on boot, but it may have been unloaded for some reason. Or maybe sounds can be deceiving...

Even if the driver is loaded, you still have to install the firmware. That means you probably need to get a program called fwcutter and the wl_apsta.o file. Have a look at: http://hangdog.pihl.no-ip.org/index....d=18&Itemid=32

After the firmware is installed, you need to reload the driver.
# modprobe -r bcm43xx
# modprobe bcm43xx

After that you'd probably want to edit /etc/rc.d/rc.wireless.conf to setup your WEP key and SSID et cetera.

This is what I pulled from lspci:
00:0d.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)

This is the result of running iwconfig:
root@slack:~# iwconfig
lo no wireless extensions.

eth0 IEEE 802.11b/g ESSID:off/any Nickname:"slack"
Mode:Managed Access Point: Invalid Bit Rate=1 Mb/s
RTS thr:off Fragment thr:off
Encryption key:off
Link Quality:0 Signal level:0 Noise level:0
Rx invalid nwid:0 Rx invalid crypt:0 Rx invalid frag:0
Tx excessive retries:0 Invalid misc:0 Missed beacon:0

sit0 no wireless extensions.

Here's dmesg:
bcm43xx: PHY connected
bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.
bcm43xx: PHY connected
bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.
USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v3.0
kmem_cache_create: duplicate cache uhci_urb_priv
<c014dd1f> kmem_cache_create+0x30f/0x3b0 <e0d45033> uhci_hcd_init+0x33/0x92 [uhci_hcd]
<c0130e52> sys_init_module+0xe2/0x160 <c0102de7> syscall_call+0x7/0xb
USB Universal Host Controller Interface driver v3.0
kmem_cache_create: duplicate cache uhci_urb_priv
<c014dd1f> kmem_cache_create+0x30f/0x3b0 <e0d45033> uhci_hcd_init+0x33/0x92 [uhci_hcd]
<c0130e52> sys_init_module+0xe2/0x160 <c0102de7> syscall_call+0x7/0xb
bcm43xx: PHY connected
bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.
NET: Registered protocol family 10
lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions
IPv6 over IPv4 tunneling driver
bcm43xx: PHY connected
bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed.
root@slack:~#

And this is lsmod:
bcm43xx 419200 0
ieee80211softmac 23808 1 bcm43xx
ieee80211 29896 2 bcm43xx,ieee80211softmac

Thanks for the help guys. This is great.

You have not installed the firmware for this card. See the current thread in the wireless networking forum, since you have this same problem.
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...d.php?t=535759

The message about the microcode being missing for the bcm43xx chip is the significant error message.

"bcm43xx: Error: Microcode "bcm43xx_microcode5.fw" not available or load failed."

The .fw is the firmware file you have to create with the firmware cutter - or you could blacklist the bcm43xx module and use the ndiswrapper approach. See the thread above, and some similar threads in the wireless networking forum.

The good news is that you have a chip which should work fine in Linux with either the native driver or ndiswrapper.

Bob

Starwobble: see what happens when you take advise? SactoBob is exactly right, follow his link before getting back to us.